I finally heard back ....

Late this evening, I got an e-mail from D. It seems all my worrying was for nothing; she had just been really slammed all day at work, and hadn't had a chance even to sit down at a keyboard long enough to drop me a quick note. No, I hadn't crossed any invisible lines; yes, everything was fine. All the passion and exuberance that I have been hearing in her e-mails for the past couple weeks was there in spades.

I had been pondering whether I should post some or all of this last exchange, but I don't think there's any special need. I've pretty much summed it up in the preceding paragraph. I just thought I should say something, since in my post earlier today I had expressed a measure of worry. There was one interesting point, however. In my e-mail to D last night, I had mentioned incidentally that I have a business trip coming up in a couple of weeks. It will be taking me for three days to a city that is a long ways away from where D lives, but that is at any rate in the same time zone (which my home city is not). It was a throw-away remark, in amongst a lot of other stuff, but D obviously spotted it.

And it appears that I have a date ....

Wish me well.

.

Counseling 13

My e-mails with D have continued as intense as they were before, and then today I have heard nothing from her at all. So I have been watching my Inbox fairly closely, worried that something I wrote last night may have crossed a line I didn't know existed. All of which is only to say that today's session with Counselor didn't have my full attention.

But maybe it should have. Wife announced that Boyfriend 5 (and his father) want to visit us some time in the next couple of months. Say what? Yes, she went on. They don't think it is fair to ask her to fly all the way to the Old Country to visit them if she hasn't ever met them in person. And Wife even agreed that she would feel more comfortable making an international trip to far away if she had earlier met the people she would be visiting.

Counselor asked me how I felt about this, and my first question was, "Are you asking me or telling me?" (She wasn't asking.) So how do I feel about it? Hell, I don't know. What difference does it make how I feel about it? It's a free country and it's not exactly like I can stop them.

But Counselor pushed a little more and I had to say something. I started by saying that -- as Wife knows all too well -- I'm not terribly good about sharing my living space with people I don't know. No problem, they'd come in an RV, so they wouldn't have to sleep on the sofa. (Why don't they just teleport? Surely it would be cheaper. Besides, then they could sleep in the comfort of their own beds at night and still come back the next morning.) Does that address my concerns?

No, of course it doesn't. Since I believe these people are continuing to lie to Wife about basic things, and since I can't figure out their motivations, I have to assume the worst. That includes assuming that they plan to case the house, or at least help themselves to anything small and moveable on the way out. Maybe not, of course, but I don't have enough data to take any possibilities off the table. So I suggested maybe they -- we -- could meet at a restaurant instead of our house.

Wife isn't too thrilled about that. I mean, she doesn't mind meeting at a restaurant first, but she sees their visit as lasting a couple of days and obviously wants to be able to bring them back to the house in the meantime. She also accused me of resisting this idea because I don't like them.

Well no, I don't. But there are people I dislike whom I would nonetheless trust not to steal from me. I didn't emphasize my fear of theft, but I did tell Wife that I thought the basic question of trust had to be settled before we could even talk about liking / disliking; and I pointed out that I don't know them well enough to have reached even that first level yet. (I remained silent about the things I do know which make me actively distrust them. I figured it was not the right time.)

However, Counselor had a good idea here. (Or somebody did ... I don't quite remember who.) I agreed, in a theoretical kind of way, that it would be a good thing if I could get to the point of trusting these people more ... sort of the way it could be useful for Hell to freeze over. Wife also wants me to trust them. So how about we take this goal -- my becoming able to trust these varmints -- as a common goal and brainstorm ways to achieve it? That way we can at least talk about these things without the conversation having to degenerate into Hosea vs. Wife. And who knows? We might come up with something.

I don't hold out a lot of hope for that, but at least we got through the session without any major tantrums or other trouble. And if we can get to a point where Wife is more willing to talk to me about Boyfriend 5 and his family, that might be progress too. I guess that's enough for one session.

Meanwhile I still haven't heard back from D since last night -- this is the longest she has gone without e-mailing me in two weeks -- so I am really beginning to wonder if I put my foot in it badly. I'll let you know once I find out.

.

Eight things I love about Wife

Back at the end of September, I promised I would write this post; so it is about time I did. After all the griping that I do in this forum, it is only fair if I give some of the other side. And really, I would never have married Wife in the first place if she hadn't had a lot more going for her than I have given you any reason to expect. So let me try to summarize a few of those things.

Grammatical note: For simplicity, I am going to write this all in the present tense. Some of these things have become less true over time, or fluctuate with the ups and downs of her health. But they are all part of the overall picture.

Wife is smart.

We met just out of college. She was Phi Beta Kappa and on her way to graduate school: literature major, classics minor ... the only person I know who can sight-read Latin. Back when Umberto Eco published The Name of the Rose, I read it to Wife because I thought she would enjoy it. She laughed heartily at all the little medievalist in-jokes Eco buried in the book, and translated the long passages of Latin for me by reading it straight off the page (as I would do with English.)

Wife is funny.

I tried to remember some of her better one-liners to exhibit here, but mostly they are context-dependent and wouldn't sound funny on the page. But in the flow of conversation they sparkle: her timing is perfect, her comments acerbic. Like other people I know who suffer a lot of pain over a long time, Wife learned that wisecracks helped her cope, ... just a bit. And she's good at them.

Wife is ambitious, sometimes even cocky.

OK, not so much these days, and the change has been a big blow to her. But part of the reason the blow was so severe is that, whatever she has done, her goal was always the top. At one point, when we were discussing a graduate program and were unsure if it was really the right move, Wife proposed law school as a back-up alternative on the grounds that there is always a demand for lawyers. “Besides,” she added, “How hard can it be?” [Memo: It didn’t actually work out anything like that. But at the time her sheer audacity was bracingly refreshing.]

Wife is demanding, of herself as well as others.

Again, she was never as successful as she wanted to be. But there was a track-record of real achievement to back up the ambition. And after all, sometimes "high maintenance" also means high performance".

• I already mentioned Phi Beta Kappa.


• Years later, when she was teaching high school English, students would come into her classroom the first day and say, "No! Don't tell me I got assigned to Mrs. Hosea's class. I'll have to work twice as hard as any of my friends!" One of these students came back the year after he graduated, though, to tell her, "Mrs. Hosea, do you realize I am teaching all the guys in my frat how to write an essay? There are Juniors at my college who don't even know what a topic sentence is! I hated your class when I was taking it, but now I am so glad you pounded all that stuff into my head ...."


• That was about the same time she wrote an editorial essay for the big metropolitan newspaper near where we lived at the time. (Think on the scale of the Times, the Post, the Tribune ....) She submitted it after working through about 27 drafts, and some junior assistant editor called her to say they'd like to run it if only they could cut it down by a third. Wife said she would rather do the cutting herself. Junior Assistant Editor -- having worked with authors before, obviously -- demurred. So Wife pulled out a copy of what she had sent in, and started going through it on the phone, sentence by sentence, trimming every bit of remaining fat. At the end, she had it the right length, and Junior Assistant Editor just said, in a hushed voice, "That's the best author cut I have ever seen." Oh, ... and the piece was funny, too.


• Years after that she was working in, ... well, let’s call it small-scale custom manufacturing. Supposedly she was the Shop Manager (i.e., operations and not sales), but there were certain clients who wouldn’t talk to anybody else. She always said at that job that her employees hated her but her customers loved her: she could get them exactly the product they wanted, at a price where the store still made money. The jobs she brought in were difficult, and she asked a lot of her staff ... but none of her competitors could turn out the same product in the same time for the same price.


• Fast forward again, to a time when the boys are in school and Wife has had to leave work because of illness. Time and again she would butt heads with their teachers. I would hear about it over dinner, “Hosea, I can’t stand it! I am so much better a teacher than that woman in their classroom.” “Yes, dear, but you are too sick to hold down a job with a regular schedule, so let her do her best.” Now, the boys were both in a special program in the school district, one that the district took a dim view of. And from time to time, some issue affecting the program would come before the school board. When this happened, the teachers in the program let us parents know about it, and they’d ask us to attend the school board meeting to support the program. Usually this job fell to the mothers, and usually there would be several of them there, plugging the program as best they could. But they all looked and sounded like Somebody’s Mom: sweatshirt, blue jeans, tennis shoes. The rest of the day that would be fine, but sometimes during school board meetings it seemed to undercut the delivery of the message. In any event, Wife took the assignment a bit differently. Even if she had just spent the afternoon shouting at one of the teachers – heck, even if she was not currently on speaking terms with the teachers – she knew better than to let the program be ploughed under. And so, before the board meeting, she would go back home to get dressed: suit, hose, pumps, pearls, tasteful earrings, hair in a professional bun, makeup. Then, when the board opened the floor to allow comments from the public, she was clear, organized, articulate; she knew all the educational jargon; and she could speak the languages of both management and the classroom. And she knocked them dead.

Wife is a good teacher.

This may sound obvious after the foregoing stories, but I mean more than that she is demanding. It continues to amaze me, but for all her impatience with other aspects of life, Wife is infinitely patient in the classroom. The turmoil and confusion of her outside life fall away; she is clear and organized and always unruffled. And she is consistent, whether teaching one student or thirty.

Wife is a good mother.

This point strikes, if you will, closer to home. I have alluded to the few times that Wife has really bombed in the area of motherhood (see here for only one example), but what is remarkable is that there are so few. It’s not just that every parent has bad days – heaven knows I’ve had more than my share. It’s that Wife’s own parents were such a catastrophe, in so many ways. Knowing about them, it is easy to see why Wife is as neurotic as she is, why her emotional life is so screwed up. And yet, ... “everybody knows” that abused children become abusing parents. “Everybody knows” that children raised in dysfunctional ways end up learning that the dysfunctional behavior is “normal” and passing it on to the next generation. “Everybody knows” these things, and for the most part they might even be true ... but not for Wife. Wife has worked very hard to see through the crazy things her parents did, so that she won’t repeat the patterns herself. And for the most part, she has succeeded admirably. The boys are absolutely secure in knowing that they have her unconditional love. She has a few bad days, I guess, but no more than any other parent.

Wife is idealistic.

Oh my word. I could talk for days. Let me give only two examples.

Early in our marriage, Wife came home to our apartment in the mid-afternoon to interrupt a burglar, who was carrying off our neighbor’s television set. She later identified him and filed a report with the police. For various reasons this became a big, divisive issue in the little community where we lived (never mind the details right now) and it caused Wife a lot of grief. Most everybody we knew congratulated her on her courage, but soon added, “Don’t you know better than to confront a burglar?” But Wife stuck to her guns. At one point I was talking with Wife’s mother, who was still alive back then, about how very difficult the whole situation had been for Wife, and how she refused to make things easier by just backing away from it. Her mother sighed ruefully, but with obvious pride in her voice, and said, “You know, Hosea, it’s that righteous indignation. The whole family suffers from it sumthin’ terrible.”

In every school where Wife has ever taught, she has been an instantly polarizing figure. She accepted no standard but the best. And whenever a school accepted less than that – cutting class time to make room for extracurricular activities, or nudging up the star quarterback’s grades so he didn’t lose his eligibility – Wife was incapable of keeping her mouth shut. As a result, she could bring out in the open – as a newcomer – tensions that had been submerged among the faculty for years. During her first year at every new school she ever joined, she became a fault line. Invariably the faculty would polarize into those who supported Wife and those who opposed her. The irony is that her idealism sounded arrogant to those who didn’t want to be held accountable to it, but she never meant it arrogantly. When an opponent would derisively challenge her that she wanted everyone else to be just like her, she would reply in all innocence, “Oh no, not at all.” She was all too aware of where she fell short of the ideals she supported, and she wanted the school to aspire to far better than that!

Wife is – or can be – astonishingly empathetic.

I have often said, with only slight overstatement, that Wife can find something to discuss with anybody. It’s true that I’ve also said sometimes she can be tone deaf about what is the right thing to say; but that she can get a conversation going with anybody at all – that she can, in fact, find something that she and the other person have in common, as a point of personal connection, regardless of who it is – this is by itself remarkable.

She is even better when it comes to understanding pain. Maybe – probably – it is because she has been in so much pain herself, over the course of her life; but whatever the reason, she has a profound intuitive understanding of suffering, even in perfect strangers. Wife can talk to anyone about their problems.

One ironic consequence of this talent is that back when she was a teacher, for all her idealism about standards, her A students were rarely her favorites. Her A students, after all, came at her from a position of strength; as a result, all they ever encountered were her strengths in turn, and they all tended to think of her as a demanding, aggressive bitch. But the students who came to her (initially) asking for mercy on an assignment, because of problems external to the school that blocked their ability to focus on schoolwork – the students who lived in gang territory, and stayed up every night fearing that their older brothers could be killed; the students who had to fend for themselves when they got home, because the parents were separated or bankrupt or alcoholic or dead – these students found in Wife (sometimes to their great surprise) an ocean of boundless compassion. She would talk with them for hours after school to give whatever advice she could, and to lend a soft shoulder when advice was no longer possible. And she would ignore the persistent reprimands from her Principals that “Once 3:00 pm rolls around, these kids are no longer our problem until tomorrow morning. Send them away!”

Even now, sick as she is, Wife volunteers on a “prayer line”. Twice a week, she logs into a system that routes phone calls to her (along with other volunteers), a system kind of like the old Dial-a-Prayer except that the caller can explain his problems and ask for a particular kind of prayer. Wife is forbidden (for legal and policy reasons) to give concrete advice; but she listens to the callers pour out their hearts, and then she tries to shape the prayer in a way that she thinks will help them in the right direction. After her shift is done, she can be cynical (even bitchy) about the theology of the organization which sponsors this service; she can get tired of the fellow who calls every single week to ask for a prayer that he win the lottery. But every week there is someone whose story touches her deeply, and whom she tries to touch in turn during the five minutes she is allowed to spend with him.

There is more, but this will do for now.

In any event, the bottom line is – has always been – that Wife is the most remarkable woman I have ever met. Every so often, when she frustrates or angers me past endurance, I have to pause and remember why I married her. And when I think of all these things, I sigh and reflect that – even if I had known just how high the cost was going to be – I probably would have decided to pay it anyway, to keep her from getting away. Young romantic love disdains to measure how heavy burdens are, before taking them on. And I suppose this is a good thing.

You always love the one you hurt

Looking back at the week of tumultuous e-mails that ended up with this one from D, I was struck by how much of the time I seemed to spend stepping on D's toes and then apologizing. Partly this is because I didn't know D well enough to know where all the landmines could be; partly, it is undoubtedly because she had at that point already fallen in love with me and was trying hard not to say anything ... so she was extra-sensitive from the get-go.

But what really struck me in retrospect was the effect that this dynamic had on me. I think it does not go too far to say that I found myself more tenderly inclined towards her the more often I had to apologize for having said something that hurt her feelings.

This is truly amazing, if not crazy.

I should add that I don't think this works all the time. I could imagine an obnoxious neighbor always yelling at me over imagined slights, and I don't think it would have the same effect. [In fact, my neighbors are just great, but you know what I mean.] If I hadn't already been very fond of D, I don't think I would have cared about her opinion nearly as much.

But why should it work at all? Thinking about it briefly, here is my first theory. When I apologize for hurting somebody else's feelings, I find -- if, as I say, she is somebody I already care about -- that part of the apology is to say, "Of course I could never have meant to hurt you because I am so fond of you ...." Then it is almost as if my heart hears what I am saying and decides to ratchet up her standings in my affections by just a bit -- in response to hearing what I said. Or here is a second theory. When I hurt somebody's feelings, I get distressed about it (in a small way, to be sure) because I don't want to hurt other people. Then the juxtaposition of the pain (of having caused offense) and pleasure (since this is someone of whom I am already fond) creates an amplification of whatever feeling was there before, and my heart (being pretty simple-minded) interprets that amplification as heightened affection.

Of course both theories are probably muddled, if not rubbish. But somehow my heart seems to work this way. It is very confusing. It may partly explain why I seem disproportionately likely to get attached to high-maintenance women (I mean emotionally high-maintenance) ... Wife herself being the prime example, of course, but D and some early girlfriends also come to mind.

I was a little reassured when I saw today's post from Ms. Inconspicuous, which contained the following lines (in a very different context): "So, you see, we were both out swinging. Which led to debate. Which led to a spat. Which led to apologies. Which led to a softening of conversation and some trust." But I still kind of wonder: Do other people find the same thing? Is this a well-known step in the dance of affection? Should I have recognized this interplay between hurt and tenderness long ago? Or am I just slightly deranged?

In any event, there you have it. Anybody who ever decides she wants me to fall for her now has a technique ready to hand. I figure it is safe to explain it here, because nobody in blogland will have the slightest interest. (On top of which, none of you knows where I live.) But for someone who did have an interest, it seems like all she would have to do is ...

... Pick a fight.

Sheesh.

.

Counseling 12

Wife was late and spent the first 15 minutes after she arrived talking compulsively about trivia. Fortunately I had been briefed by D (who talks to Wife regularly on the phone these days) what to expect on the agenda; so I declined to engage with the trivia and asked Wife if this was really what she wanted to talk about.

What she wanted to talk about, in reality, was whether she could travel to the Old Country to visit Boyfriend 5 and his family. She mentioned that she could use D's sister's frequent flyer miles, even if she had to supplement them with some of ours somehow. She said she had waited until the appointment with Counselor to raise the question, because she was afraid that I would get mad. I reminded her, in turn, that I had suggested exactly this a few months ago. I explained that I had concerns -- based on my strong suspicions that Boyfriend 5 is a fraud -- that if she made the trip then bad things could happen to her. But I also added that of course I can't stop her: she's a big girl with her own credit cards, so she can do what she wants.

A couple more details. After some prodding from Counselor, I admitted a second layer of concern -- namely, the normal "jealous husband" concerns in case the whole storyline with Boyfriend 5 turns out true. Wife agreed that maybe we could figure out some ways of reducing the risks that worry me most. And she also said something odd ... namely, that she didn't want me to use this trip as an occasion to demand she choose between us. Now whatever made her think that? I can't say.

But something I noticed is that I didn't feel any of the anxiety I normally feel when we discuss these sorts of things. It was routine ... not quite boring, but almost. And I'm not sure what that means. Is it just that this kind of discussion has become so commonplace between us? Is it that I think everything she says is a bluff? Or is it that I am starting not to worry if she decides to up and leave? And if the last, is it because the purple romantic prose I get (at this point) every day from D in e-mail makes me figure I can live without Wife? Or what?

I don't know what is causing it, but that unconcern is itself more concerning than anything that was said today.

Jane's conscience

I was thinking about the fact that I haven't posted anything in a couple of days, and realized that I have nonetheless been writing a lot. It just hasn't taken the form of an actual post. Part of this has been a series of e-mails with Veni that I hope we can post as a dialog some time down the road. And a lot of it has also been in a series of comments to a post here by Jane Doe about her conscience. It's a little off-topic from the main themes of this blog, but not completely. Anyway, this is to salve my own conscience by letting you know that I have still been actively at work at the keyboard. I've also been exchanging mail with D ....

E-mails with D: I love you

So far, I have extracted three substantial threads from my discussions with Wife’s good friend D. (See the posts here, here, and here.) A fourth has started – as I have asked her what she thinks of the relationship with Boyfriend 5 – but I have to table it for the moment because it has hit an fairly unsatisfying dead end. Maybe I can get something out of it later.

In the meantime, though, something else was going on. Because I have extracted chunks of text from D and not given the whole e-mails intact, I have had to cut out some of the stylistic touches, the asides, the salutations, and so forth. And over the last couple of weeks, these have taken on more and more a very particular color. I have to add that, being a simple-minded fellow but a gifted mimic, I soon found myself writing in the same way.

OK, scratch that. There is something – not a lot – to the "gifted mimic" part, but I wasn’t purely simple-minded about it. At first I thought she was just being colorful; after a while I was pretty sure it was more than that, and I had to weigh what I thought I should be saying back to her – but also, truth to tell, what I wanted to say back to her. And this got more and more delicate over time.

I had better start giving you some concrete examples, so you have some idea what I am talking about. As always, I have put D’s words in blue and mine in green.

It started off simply enough. After her visit (reported back here) I dropped her a note as follows:

Hi D!
Just wanted to drop you a quick note. [text snipped] ... It was great to see you. Your visits are always too short. All our love ....
Best regards,
Hosea

She replied:

Dear Hosea,
Thanks so much for writing; it was wonderful to hear from you!
[text snipped]
To honor honesty, I should tell you how impressed I was during my last visit by your energy, your ability to laugh and love, and your reference to those elements of life-the Greeks, family, intellectual zest and knowledge in diverse fields-that have inspired you for as long as I've been privileged to know you. You seem to me to have come to a point of wisdom and surprising youthfulness after a period of great trial and difficulty. I honor and respect you; I feel fortunate to call you 'friend'.
Take care; Godspeed.
D

A little while later, she wrote asking if I could suggest books on a certain subject for a student, and it was all straightforward:

Dear Hosea
I hope you are well!
[text snipped]
Take care, be well, and thanks for any help you can provide.
D

And I answered:

Dear D,
So good to hear from you again.
[text snipped]
Love as always,
Hosea

But then I sent her the letter quoted here and got back the reply quoted in the same post. And here is where things seemed to change a little. Partly this is because we were discussing much heavier things – the kinds of things I write about here. By the end of one of those letters, I found myself emotionally pretty drained, and I assume it was similar on D’s side. And this affects how we wrote. Leaving aside all the substance to focus on the trivia of salutations and conclusions, we now had ...

Dear D,
[text]
Love as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
Take care; Godspeed.
Love,
D.

My dear D,
[text]
Love,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
Godspeed and much love,
D

Dear D,
[text]
Lots and lots of love, as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[Text. This was the e-mail I discussed here, where D insisted that love could be sustained on the basis of words alone. However, I had earlier suggested that it made no sense for Wife’s frame of mind to be so warped by the impending mortality driven by her diseases (bear with me, it's off-topic right now); and D sharply disagreed, insisting on the centrality of physical life to any notion of the good or any kind of redemption. Again, mostly this is off-topic except that it sets up a remarkable last paragraph, as follows ....]
My children are right. I can't write emails, only letters. I trust you to take what is valuable from the rest; I hope that you know of my sustaining love for you. It's odd to even talk about love after writing about the importance, no, the necessity of physical love. I'm not sure what else to say. On some level, I do believe in love knit together by the appreciation for the gifts of mind and spirit. If it is not finally sustainable without the physical...that's something I will have to think about. I know I still feel your last embrace, hear your laughter, see your devoted boundary-setting with your children in my mind. Does that count?
With very much love,
D

Dear D,
[text]
With great love, as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
All my love,
D

Dear, dear D
[text]
I have to go for now. But my thoughts and my love go with this mail to you.
All my love,
Hosea

About this time, we got into something of a struggle about the topic I mentioned up above as a dead end. D had heard something from Wife that she thought explained part of the relationship with Boyfriend 5, but that wasn’t going to have any impact on the here-and-now. I wanted to know what it was, and D thought it would violate a confidence to tell me. We disagreed about this for a bit, and I pouted but said that of course if she didn’t think she could tell me then that was that. I was probably a little too sulky in the way I said it, because what I got back was:

Dearest Hosea,
Gosh, I'm really being mis-understood this time. I thought you were beginning to realize that I seem to be unable to deny you anything. Hosea, I simply don't make pronouncements that can't be discussed.
[text]
I would do almost anything to spare you fear and sadness. Right now, I share your sadness. What can I do to help you understand better?
All my love,
D

In my reply, I kind of fell all over myself apologizing because I really had been an immature prat in the way I had tried to pout information out of her. But then the next day we had the exchange of e-mails on the subject of child abuse, which I have reprinted here. That post contains four e-mails we exchanged the same day. The first two are reproduced in that post, complete and intact. The second two had some stuff sliced out, because it belongs here and not there, as follows. (I have repeated bits and pieces from what I quoted before, when it kind of belonged in both places.)

Dearest Hosea,

[first two paragraphs as given before]

As I suggested in an earlier email, I never truly knew you for years because Wife rarely said anything complimentary, and I spent little time with you. What happened that morning [several years ago when I was talking] with you was a true awakening, a clear and shining moment revealing why the well-being and concerns of yourself should claim my attention. Intuitively, I guessed what you might be, and despite your love and devotion for Wife, and the lack of any place in your affections for me outside of a certain enjoyment of my patience and autodidact turn of mind, it still seemed worthwhile to try and restore you to a place of honor within your own family, with my friend and your wife. I'm well aware that I have few tools to use, and even those might do more harm than good. But it seemed worthwhile to try. I honored and respected your desire to live honestly and your eighteenth century notion of honor and how a gentleman ought to behave even in the most difficult situations resonated deeply with me. If Boyfriend 5 was exposed, and Wife realized your love for her and responded with devotion and gratitude, that, I thought a little bleakly, might be reward enough for me

I am willing to make almost any sacrifice for you, but it is helpful to know what exactly is demanded. You should have told me about your depression and despair. My guess is my son, so like me, picked up your sadness and loneliness easily when he stayed with you. This afternoon, I saw a level of helplessness and and despair in you that remade the entire situation. It is not that I haven't read and re-read your letter. I believe who you say you are. I also, after today, know who you think you are. Hosea, I will give you to Wife, but not to despair. I'm not asking you to put me first, but I will say a third time, that the gift of my friendship and love should not be beyond you to accept.

My prayer? Let us be ourselves.

All my love,
D


Dear D,

Thank you. Very much.

This was a very difficult afternoon. And honestly, it has been a very difficult week. I have been surprised and startled enough this week that when I read your letter early this afternoon I have to confess I had no idea -- despite your many reassurances up till now -- what to expect.

"Surprised and startled"? Whatever for?

=====BEGIN LONG EXPLANATORY DIGRESSION=====

Where to begin? For years, our friendship (yours and mine) rested on a comparatively superficial level. I enjoyed your enthusiasm for ideas, and I was flattered by the fact that you listened to what I had to say and responded; but -- as you rightly point out -- we spent very little time together. As a result, you fell in my mind into the broad category of "Wife's Friends." Granted you were one of the most charming and delightful of the people in that category, but we saw each other rarely enough that the category was adequate.

Even more recently, we haven't spent a *lot* of time together, for the simple reason that we live [thousands of miles apart]. But the times we have spent together have recently been somewhat more concentrated ... intense ... than they were before. During this last visit, I have to wonder how Wife felt about it that you ostensibly came "to visit her" as being "her friend" and yet almost none of the conversation included her. Not that she was deliberately EXcluded, but it was as if she excluded herself ... or as if we were so busy talking to each other that she had little chance to break in. Maybe you remember it differently; but I felt a little funny about it at the time -- and I assume that if *I* felt funny about it, Wife must have felt ten times as funny. It did seem to me that I got a much more enthusiastic or demonstrative greeting and parting from you than she did. Did she notice that too? Did you?

And then, just in the last week when we have been mailing each other a lot, the whole verbal style of our mail has changed. Words like "dearest" and "all my love" can be simple conventional formulas to open and close letters, but they sound less like conventional formulas when the letters they bracket say things like "I still feel your last embrace" and "I seem to be unable to deny you anything." Now please understand, I'm not complaining or accusing: I've been writing in *exactly* the same way to you. I sit down at the keyboard, hear your voice in my head as I read your latest e-mail, and it seems like the only way to write ... the only way I *can* write. Only I think it is not how we *used* to write to each other, on the rare occasions that we did, and so I don't have a lot of familiar landmarks to orient myself. It has been difficult, in the last week, for me to know where I am.

On top of that, I have hurt you inadvertently more times in the last week, I think, than in the 18 years before that. I hate hurting people. I especially hate hurting people that I care about ... that I care about, indeed, more deeply than I long imagined. But it was always inadvertent ... which means that every single time I thought I was saying something innocuous right up until the moment you read it. And then somehow it turned into a weapon to wound you. The result is that it has been difficult, in the last week, for me to know what I am saying.

I think part of the reason I have hurt you so much and so often in the past week is precisely that, in many ways, I still don't know you very well, ... or at any rate not nearly well enough. If you tally up the hours we have spent in each other's company, the total number still isn't all that big. So you can use a word like "friendship" and to you it is quite clear what you mean by it. But I don't necessarily know for sure what friendship means TO YOU. As a result, I will say something -- out of uncertainty or anxiety or caution -- that genuinely hurts your feelings because you have already *said* you are my friend and it is perfectly obvious to you that *no* friend would ever do this or that. And when you say it, of course it is obvious to me too, and I feel terrible for having said something different. Only I didn't know until then that friendship really included this or that for you, since some people use the word without meaning those things. Or, in short, I have not always known what you are saying either.

In summary, this week, I have not been able to tell very clearly: (1) where we stand with respect to each other; (2) what I am saying to you; and (3) what you are saying to me. And this has left me singularly ill-equipped to know what to anticipate next.

=====END LONG EXPLANATORY DIGRESSION=====

[Then there follows the substance of my second letter as posted below in green. But after wrapping up the stuff about Wife’s absurd allegations of child abuse, I concluded as follows.]

Last comment for now. Your very last words [above] are, "I will say a third time, that the gift of my friendship and love should not be beyond you to accept." I must beg you to understand that I *do* accept this so far as I understand it. Please, please, please recognize that any time I say or do something which looks to you like a sign that I have not accepted your friendship and love, it does *not* mean that. All it means is that I have not understood the connection between this thing (whatever I did or said) and your friendship and love. It's not that I am being stand-offish or disdainful. It is just that I don't know you well enough yet. So please be patient with me on this point.

I wish you were here. I think we could communicate better in person. Even the telephone isn't really good enough for this kind of conversation. Also, far more important, there is a kind of comfort in touch and presence that words cannot match -- the momentary pressure of fingers on a hand, the embrace when words fail, even just the quiet sitting together in the same room. I look at what I write on the screen, and it is never enough. Often it isn't even quite right. But touch and presence are not available to us right now, so words will have to do in their stead. Please forgive me and be patient with me when they fall short of the mark or miss it entirely.

I must close. Maybe later I will be able to see the whole of your letter below more clearly, so that I can answer it with more light, and with less storm and stress. Maybe later we can once again take up some of the other things we have talked about. But I am tired and grow inattentive. Best I close now, before I lose track of what I am saying.

All my love,
Hosea

And that brings us up as far as late Thursday night. Friday about lunchtime, I posted my quick note that the plot had thickened. That was the time that I got this e-mail.

Dearest Hosea,

Thank you.

Just a few comments before I get ready for school.

Hosea, I never meant to fall in love with you. If you feel awkward and unsure, know that we share this confusion. I knew I was close to the edge when I saw you last in [your city]. I left that evening because I realized I did not trust myself around you after Wife went to bed; I wanted you and was determined to spare you the net. Since you have loyalties which are more complex than mine, the conflict would be unsupportable. I might do you harm...it is certainly more than I could contemplate, and there are other factors against me, that you know of. I meant to shut the door, but I have not been able to do so very well, have I? I know from Wife that you have seriously considered establishing another relationship with a woman and using your home for meetings [WHAAAT??? See below!!]; I am not possessive, but my hunger is difficult to deny. It has been years since I have had sex; what I have with [my husband] is companionship, deep respect and laughter, but none of the passion I feel for you. At least you know the truth now; I seem unable to conceal much from you any more.

Slowly and with some reluctance, I think I will ask you to tell me about those years with Wife that [my son] glimpsed on his visit. I have long felt that those times were exceedingly dark. [My son] told me he spent hours in the shower, unable to stop his tears. He remembers your frustration and anger at his behavior. I was alarmed and frightened; for the first and only time, I called his priest ([my son] is Orthodox, you will remember) and asked for help. I removed him as soon as possible, and he ended his Latin lessons soon afterwards, although recently, he has discussed resuming them at [college] and perhaps majoring in history as well as chemistry. I will not ask [my son] about his visit; I trust whatever you are willing to tell me.

Perhaps a little light on how to go forward. Hosea, simply hold me to your standards of ethics and morality and see if I am worthy to be your friend. You don't just talk about friendship; you discuss the art of relationship in lucid paragraphs that could be lifted from a textbook, and then it's philosophy and then ten other subjects for as long as you have the patience to stay with me. I remember so clearly you quoting an entire page of Aristotle to help me build an argument, smiling, with the patience of a master. And you wonder why I am enamored? :-) I am quite willing to be held accountable to any standard you deem necessary and appropriate. You can probably assume that if your definition of friendship includes a certain virtue, mine either does, or needs to, and you can say that. What you really can't do, and what is hurtful, is to diminish my love by believing that somehow, while you grasp it intellectually, it is out of your reach physically and emotionally.

Yes, I wish we could touch each other. More than you know. I understand restraint is the remedy, but I occasionally, mutinously, think it also disposes of my happiness. Most of the time, I remind myself that I decided to put your interests and love for Wife before my own interests, and I remain committed to that objective. But you should not doubt that my sentiments are genuine and for you alone.

Take care, be well. Godspeed.

I love you,
D

Hosea....this never reached you this morning; email failure. I admit I am emotionally exhausted. The air seems to hurt my skin today; I'm over-sensitized and defenseless. I had the students write essays, which means endless paper grading for me, but it was all I could do. Even simple tasks seemed beyond me. My room-mate (I share a classroom) asked me to take a test he wrote for his standard U. S. class. I had to pause and focus when a question came up on the tariffs of the early nineteenth century-did they help foster sectionalism? Of course. But I had to think before I could even lock onto the question. I hope you are better rested and more confident. I haven't felt this insecure for a while. Sigh* Do take care.

And I had to decide how to respond to this! Well, fortunately, as I noted before, D and we live a long, long ways apart; so any practical decisions will have to wait regardless. But naturally I had to say something. Here is what I said:

Dear, dear D,

First things first: of course you are worthy to be my friend. Never doubt it for a moment. And never doubt that you have my love. I don't know what that will mean for us in the long term -- love is an infinitely protean thing, and the situation is a little complicated. :-) But you must know that I could not write to you the way I have all week -- the way I did last night! -- if you didn't have my love secure in your keeping. Indeed, I look at the last week and have to smile (through all the turmoil) at how shamelessly I have neglected my job at work in order to write you, read your replies, and write again. Hours, D, hours.

You ask (at least implicitly) about my standards of ethics and morality and friendship. It's a fair question, except that I try not to live my life according to a handbook. A principled life isn't like consulting a checklist: good, better, best, ... whoops, missed a box at item #4, three points off. It's more like just paying attention to what you are doing, with love and honesty: honesty foremost to yourself, and to others so far as it does not put you in direct peril. The down side is that it can be harder (this way) to decide what to do; the up side is that when you finally do decide, you truly know both that it is right and that it is what you want. Besides, checklists are awful things -- who wants to live by them? :-)

Over the past six months or so, I have spent a lot of time reading and commenting on a community of "infidelity blogs." These are blogs by people who are actively engaged in an affair, or who have had an affair in the past, or who are still physically faithful (for the moment) but are strongly contemplating an affair in the future. I think I may be the only regular commenter in this community who is writing from the other side of the bed, so to speak ... since my perspective is absolutely that of the "cheated-upon" (if that is a word). But you know, I like these people. I really like them. When you corrected me a few days ago on the question whether love could subsist entirely on words, I realized you were right because the people in this blog community know nothing else besides each other's words ... and yet, at some level, we can become friends. Do I believe in the importance of marriage as a permanent commitment? Obviously. Have I ever cheated on Wife? Never. But I wouldn't dream of criticizing these friends who have made different choices. All of them are wrestling with difficult stuff in their lives; the affairs are only part of that. Sometimes I might offer advice -- "You know, if you do X then I fear it could blow up in your face" -- but that's the only appropriate thing to say. I could never condemn them, because I know they are no worse than I am. All I can do is offer friendship and support as they struggle with their lives. And -- importantly -- they reciprocate. That's what friends do.

I'm only telling you this by way of saying that -- for me, at least -- it's not about "standards" as some kind of abstract principle carved on stone. It's just about love -- the whole spectrum from agape through philia to eros and especially all the interesting little grey zones in-between. :-) At one level true love *includes* standards -- because they are good for the beloved -- and a lot more besides. Of course, I have to admit that not only does true love include and impose standards, ... but sometimes it also inspires active mutiny against those very standards. ;-) Love can be very complicated.

D, dear, I have no idea where this leaves us. Right now, today, I have to agree that "awkward and unsure and confused" pretty well sums it up. For today and tomorrow and next week, it leaves us at any rate [living thousands of miles apart]. And I think that together we will have to figure out where the path leads after that. Right now, I'm not going to second-guess where that destination might turn out to be. But if we figure it out together in love and honesty, it will be right.

There is one point I must clear up. You wrote, "I know from Wife that you have seriously considered establishing another relationship with a woman and using your home for meetings." I have no idea where this came from, but it is absolutely false. I cannot imagine why Wife said such a thing. I don't even know who she's thinking of. I suppose, if I stretch my imagination, that the only person she could possibly have in mind is a co-worker in our IT department: she is a friendly woman, and once every couple of months we go out to have lunch together. But it's lunch. She and her husband are trying to adopt a child from China, so I commiserate with her about the frustrations of that process. I tell her, in turn, about the things you take for granted that change overnight when a baby enters the house. But that's it. And I am just guessing that this is who Wife means, because she is the only other woman with whom I have any significant social contact at all. I don't get out much. :-) Anyway, to jump from lunch to "another relationship" is purely false. If a private investigator had followed me around for a year and eavesdropped on every single word she and I have ever exchanged, he would have found nothing more incriminating than sandwiches and potato chips.

But now I start to wonder why Wife said this. I have no idea whether she KNOWS it is false, and is telling lies deliberately; or whether she has brooded on my (infrequent) lunches with this woman and jumped to conclusions; or what else it could possibly be. Any of the explanations I can think of would alarm me. The most I can say to account for something so bizarre is that it seems to be of a piece with the (more painful) discussion you and I had yesterday. Did she say anything to give you a clue of what her data source was? Did she say "I think that ..."? Or "Hosea told me that ..."? Or "I asked the Magic 8-Ball and it said ..."? Or did she not say? Any way you look at it, this is very, very strange.

I don't want to end on such a depressing note, however. Let me end, rather, with an attempt at encouragement. It is no surprise to me that the air hurt your skin today, because you started the day stripped bare and it is scary to feel so exposed. Here, take my jacket, wrap up in it, sit down by the fire with me, and get warm. I love you too. I don't know where we go from here, but be of good cheer -- we'll figure it out. And when we figure it out, it will be both right and what we want.

Bright blessings and all my love,
Hosea

So there you have it. That brings us up pretty much to the present. D is in love with me. I certainly love her too, although as I pointed out there are a lot of different kinds of love. At the moment I am not 100% sure which of the thousands of varieties this is. (Seems to me I remember having this problem in college!)

The odds are that it will be months before we have any opportunity to see each other again. Plenty of time to think and mull and plan. And I have been thinking already, some. But hey, since I’ve posted the story out there for all to read ... any thoughts? Comments?

Suggestions?

.

E-mails with D: Am I a child abuser?

The next thread -- this is the third -- in this prolonged exchange with D is particularly difficult and painful. Over the years -- very rarely, but with increasing frequency in, say, the last half dozen years -- Wife has alleged that I am physically dangerous to be around, and that she is afraid for herself or the children.

This is bullshit.

More precisely, I can't say for sure whether she is afraid. But I can guarantee that the children aren't, and that no rational observer would be. That she makes this claim to her friends, pillaging my good name in the process, is terribly painful. And of course, especially with the stories one hears these days, I can't help but wonder what happens if she one day drags me into court and produces these friends as (second-hand) "witnesses" to the atrocities I am supposed to have performed?

Most of the dialog speaks for itself. I need to add only a couple of points of background information. The first is that D works as a teacher -- and has most of her career -- but for five years she worked as a court-appointed Guardian ad litem. (See also the discussion here.) This gave her a way closer view of the effects of prolonged abuse on children (and in some cases spouses, usually wives) than she had ever wanted.

The second point of background information is that there was a time several years ago (while I was out of work) when D's teenage son came to visit with us for a week or so. Wife had been trying to tutor him in Latin long-distance, and they both decided it would work better if he would show up in person. Well, he did not fit into the family at all. He spent long hours away -- God knows where -- with Wife, allegedly walking through city parks, talking. When he was physically present in our house, he made a point of not integrating into our routines: he wouldn't get up when the rest of us got up, he stayed in his pajamas until the end of the day, he didn't adapt himself into the rhythm of the household in any way. This was irritating and I know I expressed that irritation. (Wife complained to me about it, but would never dream of speaking a word to him.) Then he left to go back home, and as near as I can tell he spent a long time after his return complaining about what a jerk I was. So that is D's one other data point about what to expect from me, besides what she hears from Wife and her own (very limited) observation.

Anyway, this blog wasn't designed to make me look good, so away we go. As usual, my words are in green and hers are in blue.

D: Dear [Hosea],

I need to talk to you after a very difficult (for me) conversation with [Wife] concerning allegations of long term physical abuse of both her and your children. [Wife] also indicated that you suffer from severe depression and are taking Wellbutrin-at high doses-to remain non-violent. These are serious allegations, and so damaging that if they are accurate, I must question your honesty and commitment to the truth, whatever you might say to the contrary. I am quite willing and able to deal with mental illness, but there is a subtle shift in the way I will filter information and evaluate certain claims, particularly when what might be shared could potentially upset you and cause you to act violently towards your wife.

[Hosea], I have known you for nineteen years. In all that time, I have personally known only kindness and clear, lucid intelligence. For the friendship and love you have offered, I owe you a profound debt of gratitude and honor. You have that claim on me. But if you attempt to deceive me, or act in ways you know I find abhorrent, you will destroy our relationship. I will walk away from you, and I will deny all that you have represented for me. I cannot afford that, whatever you might think; the possibility is deeply wounding and denies all that is good and gracious. This time, the pain is all mine.

I have to go back to school and tutor for at least another hour. You may, of course, write, or you may wish to call. Sometimes it helps to hear the music within a voice; ideas and complex matters are a bit clearer using the phone; emotional distance is more difficult. That's also a danger, but my emotions, unfortunately, are already engaged. I need some clarity, and I've earned some honesty.

Take care, Godspeed, and even now... love,
[D]

Hosea: Dear [D],

I just now left a message on your voice mail. Yes, I guess we need to talk. But let me tell you without hesitation that I categorically deny any physical abuse of either [Wife] or the children. If [Wife] says these things, I don't know what I can say on my side because I don't have a time machine in which you could travel backwards to see for yourself. Therefore I have to accept the possibility that [Wife] could, by saying these things, put an undeserved end to the friendship between you and me. If that happens, I would grieve, both for losing such a friend and because the loss was occasioned by lies. But I don't know what I can say to stop that from happening.

It is true that I take wellbutrin, but not for violence. The presenting symptoms when it was prescribed were rather lethargy and an inchoate despair. Not violence. Wellbutrin acts for me the way coffee acts for some people; it gives me the energy to get up and do things. This is not something that I discuss with others, but I am telling you because you are quite right -- you HAVE earned honesty.

[Wife] has said these things before, with varying levels of elaboration. Sometimes she makes only vague or veiled accusations. Sometimes she invents scenes that absolutely did not happen. Most often she will start with an event that did happen and then change it in a small number of very critical ways to make it far more menacing than it was in reality. I do not know whether these changes are conscious. And I suppose that in the absence of unbiased witnesses she could claim that I'm the one who remembers or reports the events wrong.

Do you want ugly truths? Here are the ugly things about me that are true, which [Wife] has inflated into worse than they were.

1. I used to shout more than I do now, when I got angry. I have a very loud voice. [Wife] has often said that she finds my shouts threatening. Sometimes I have pounded on the table for emphasis.

2. I used to get angry more often than I do now, and more easily. It is hard for me to tell when the change happened, and it might be at least PARTLY the influence of the wellbutrin. But another VERY BIG part of it is that I have learned over the years where some of my triggers are; so instead of just finding myself all of a sudden angry, I can tell when it is building up and head it off. One of these triggers is being misunderstood or falsely accused. Another big one has to do with noises, especially harsh or repetitive noises. It used to be that I would hear a harsh and repetitive noise and not even realize how crazy it was making me until I was suddenly very angry. Now I can tell that it is starting to grate on me, and I can try to stop the noise or else remove myself. In any event, I did not understand these triggers at all well when we were married, so my anger was a lot less predictable. All I can plead in my own defense is immaturity.

3. I have never struck [Wife]. Sometimes when we were arguing about something and she was going to leave rather than stay and argue, I have stood in the doorway. Once in [another city where we lived long ago] we were joking and hamming it up, and a friend snapped a photo of us mock-boxing while I held a kitchen knife. It is a very funny photo, and you are welcome to see it if you like. This is the only time I have pointed a knife in the direction of [Wife]. But that has not stopped her from claiming since then that I have threatened her at knife-point. It is not true.

4. We -- that means both of us -- used to spank the children as a form of discipline. We do so no longer. It would not be a surprise to me if I spanked harder than she did, because my muscles are stronger. But we both used that as a disciplinary technique when they were very young. I will give [Wife] credit for making the decision that they were old enough we needed to stop; and I will also give her credit for coming up with alternative forms of discipline. At the time I even agreed with her that it pained me immeasurably to spank them, but I didn't know what other tool or method we ought to use instead. I asked her to think of something, and she did. Once she thought of an alternative, I gratefully and enthusiastically adopted it. There have been a few times since then when other disciplinary methods have not worked and I have concluded that only spanking would make the point. When that happens today, I never make the decision unilaterally but always consult with [Wife]; moreover, mindful of the fact that my muscles are stronger than hers, my method whenever this happens is that I will hold the child and [Wife] administers the spanking. I don't strike anyone.

5. Is there more and worse and uglier? I can't remember anything worse right now. I know that I used to get a lot angrier than I get today, and while the points above certainly -- and on oath -- cover 99.999% of all the times I ever got angry, I cannot guarantee that I might not have expressed my anger some other way that last 0.001% of the time. If I ever did, we can at most be talking about two or three moments in 25 years; and I would be more than confident in setting my record of tantrums against [Wife]'s. (I have not itemized those for you because you have not asked.) I can also add confidently that I don't get angry like that any more. I do not believe that any objective observer would think anyone had anything to fear from me. I will guarantee that if you ask either boy -- in private, where he knows I cannot hear the answer and where he cannot be coached by anybody else in either direction -- whether he is afraid of me, both boys will say categorically No.

[D], I feel very helpless here. I will swear that what I have said above it the truth, and I will concede that it does not make me out to be a saint. I never claimed to be a saint. But I absolutely cannot accept the allegation of longterm physical abuse. That is a lie. It is not a new lie, but I have kept my mouth shut before ... thinking it did less harm to keep my mouth shut. I have let [Wife] tell her friends lies about me rather than to stand up for myself, and I have hoped that either (1) it would make no difference because they were far away, or (2) if they were nearby they could form their own opinions of me from first-hand observation, and so would take [Wife]'s stories with salt.

I don't know how this e-mail sounds to you. Maybe I have said all the wrong things and made it worse. Maybe I will have lost you as a friend, unjust and false though such a loss would be. I pray not.

At this point, I reached her by phone. She had not yet read my e-mail (immediately above) and she read it while we talked. She made a point of saying that she could go ask her son what I was like when he stayed at our house, and that she would be sure to believe him because he was her son. I said fine, go ahead. I knew that her son disliked me intensely, but I had no idea whether he could be trusted to limit what he said to what he saw. But whatever.

Anyway, partway through the phone call, D went silent for a very long time. Then she said she had suddenly come to see everything in a very different light. She needed to think about it, but she would e-mail me yet today (this was Thursday) and could I please make sure to reply to her e-mail no matter how late it was? Of course I said yes.

When her follow-on e-mail finally arrived, it ran like this:

D: Dearest [Hosea],

To be honest, I have no desire to re-open our discussion this afternoon which was so painful and difficult for you. I only do so because we have reached a place where I should answer the unspoken questions before us. Plus I *do* owe you a profound debt of honor...and I never meant for you to be scared or doubt my steadfastness.

[Hosea], I called you to try and help us understand and discuss what was said and what happened in the past. I was prepared to be hurt and I got hurt, but I don't change minute to minute. I don't change in essentials at all. I remain your friend, your support and the person who loves you. It seems like I spend a good deal of time trying to understand your marriage and I'm pretty sure that there's nothing rewarding at the end of that quest. Reflecting, I am reminded that I am older than either you or [Wife], and, because of my own childhood experiences, I sought, and struggled to develop, the kind of maturity it takes to put other people's interests before my own. That maturity is what has allowed [Wife] and I to stay friends for so many years; I listen well and I care well. I'm also collaborative by nature; I don't issue ultimatums, and I don't make decisions unilaterally....

I am willing to make almost any sacrifice for you, but it is helpful to know what exactly is demanded. You should have told me about your depression and despair. My guess is my son, so like me, picked up your sadness and loneliness easily when he stayed with you. This afternoon, I saw a level of helplessness and and despair in you that remade the entire situation. It is not that I haven't read and re-read your letter. I believe who you say you are. I also, after today, know who you think you are. [Hosea], I will give you to [Wife], but not to despair. I'm not asking you to put me first, but I will say a third time, that the gift of my friendship and love should not be beyond you to accept.

My prayer? Let us be ourselves.

All my love,
[D]

I took this more or less as acquittal, and I replied as follows:

Hosea: Dear [D],

Thank you. Very much.

This was a very difficult afternoon. And honestly, it has been a very difficult week. I have been surprised and startled enough this week that when I read your letter early this afternoon I have to confess I had no idea -- despite your many reassurances up till now -- what to expect.

"Surprised and startled"? Whatever for?

[There followed a long digression which will make part of a later post -- not this one.]

Anyway, that's what made the week so difficult. As for the letter itself -- I mean [Wife]'s accusations -- my God, what do I say? I've already told you that they are not news to me, and that they are also not true. I thought I had hardened myself against them, so that I could hear these calumnies hurled against my good name and not react. But of course, none of [Wife]'s other friends (not one!) has ever asked me about them directly; and none of her other friends has ever had the kind of professional experience that makes these accusations come alive for them. And maybe I cared more about your good opinion than about the opinions of her other friends ... because I care more about you than about them. Lastly -- least important but still a factor -- I have heard horror stories about accusations of exactly this kind being made falsely and destroying the men they were made against. I don't know if any of these horror stories is true, or if they are all propaganda, but I've heard them. And some of these stories make it sound like this is a tough generation in which to be a father. Again, maybe they aren't true ... but when you are walking alone in dark woods without a flashlight, you are more likely to believe in scary fairy tales than when you are warm and comfortable by your own hearth.

All of this combined to make me feel like the floor had dropped out from under me. All I could cling to for hope was my knowledge of your fundamental goodness ... which means that I trusted that if I was careful to tell you the exact truth, no matter how unflattering, you would be able to tell it was true. I wish I could tell you that was enough by itself to put the floor back under me. It wasn't, but it gave me a thread to cling to, and I clung to it as hard as I could.

Your e-mail [reprinted above] has rebuilt the floor under my feet. And so I repeat .... Thank you. Very much.

I hardly know how to go on; it is late and I am very tired. But there are a couple of very specific things you say that I feel I must comment on.

You may be right about what [your son] perceived. But I think you must know only a tiny bit of what that time was like. If there was despair and depression on my side, there was despair and rage on [Wife]'s. I think she came closer to leaving me then, than she ever has before or since. I thank God that she didn't -- not only on my own account but on hers, because I think it would have been catastrophic to her life and way of life by any objective measure. But she spent so much of that 18 months in a blind rage born of panic and deep, desperate terror, that if [your son] had any emotional sensitivity at all he could not help but have sensed it. Add to that the long, long hours they spent together -- hours when they were alone where nobody else was around -- and I am sure she probably said many things to him that grew out of that soup of terror and rage. He would have to have the insensibility of stone not to have perceived and absorbed and internalized gallons of that stew. If there is ever a time when you want to know more about that period in our lives, then ask and I will tell you; but I won't discuss it unless you ask. [... And so on.]

E-mails with D: Do I patronize Wife?

Here is the second of my e-mail threads with D. The basic question is whether I am patronizing to Wife, an accusation which I have discussed in various terms here and here and here and here and here. (But don't get the idea that this is a running theme in our marriage.) You may recognize a couple of other topics I have discussed from time to time; I will try to provide links where useful.

As with the previous one of these posts, this one takes its start from the first e-mail where D and I talked about Wife flying to the Old Country to visit Boyfriend 5 and his family. As before, I have put my words in green and hers in blue.

Hosea: Of course I am worried about her taking such a trip, but the "normal" fears of a husband whose wife is visiting a boyfriend form the smallest part of that worry. A much bigger chunk is devoted to worrying about what happens to her if and when she gets to [Capital City] airport and (as I strongly suspect) nobody ever shows up to meet her? Will she be able to improvise new plans -- such as to decide to take herself to a hotel and maybe see the sights on her own until her return flight? Ten years ago, I would have had no worries on that front at all; it would have been obvious to me that [Wife] could hold her own in a strange city by herself. But in the past few years she has delegated more and more organizational details to me, and she gets tired a lot faster than she used to. So I find myself wondering.

I can imagine less savory alternatives, as well. Perhaps she takes a taxi to the physical address she has for [Boyfriend 5]. What kind of a neighborhood is it in? Is it a safe place for a solitary foreign woman loaded with baggage to walk house to house trying to find somebody who isn't really there? Every large city has some neighborhoods where that would be a bad idea; but I don't know where those neighborhoods are in [Capital City], and I fear she could find herself in one after the taxi pulls away. Of course she would recognize it for a bad neighborhood, but she might explain that away on the grounds that [Boyfriend 5’s family] would naturally have to live in such a place because their political activity is seen as criminal by the [Old Country’s] government. In other words, her faith in the storyline could override her natural instincts and good sense.

It's not too hard to construct other nightmare scenarios as well, and I have thought of a lot of them.

D: Your invented scenarios seem more imagined than real. Oddly, the most helpful source for my understanding here is a film called "Into Great Silence" which chronicles the lives of several monks in a monastery. One new monk from Africa was the focus of several quiet shots which lasted many minutes. Stripped of all the clutter and movement which disfigures so much of our existence, I began to see him in a way I rarely see and love even those closest and dearest to me. I might suggest affording the same privilege to [Wife]. Listen at her, and you will learn how she feels about your worries regarding her safety. With me, [Wife] has discussed at length how patronized she often feels by your solicitous concern. She says that since she's been ill and unable to work, you decided her judgment is poor and not to be trusted. This infuriates her, but more honestly, it has hurt her deeply. I have no idea whether her intellect has been in some way compromised by her illnesses (her bookshelves seem peculiarly frozen in the past, without new volumes, but she simply may not have the desire to read or own many new books) but if so, you need to address that difficult issue squarely. Asserting that she is not being honest with you or herself and thus making poor decisions will not do as an excuse to control [Wife]'s behavior and chastise her. No adult should accept such behavior; it compromises one's sense of freedom and dignity, issues even more sensitive now that her physical condition is fragile. [Wife] is highly intelligent/ and /highly defensive and suspicious; I cannot imagine her, a [slum] child, stumbling around the streets of [Capital City] like a character out of "Bonfire of the Vanities". And neither can you...either you wish to control her travels, for all the reasons which are painfully obvious despite your denials, or she is not as mentally capable as before. You have said nothing about her mental health outside of her constant fatigue to indicate she cannot navigate a strange city (that said, I must be honest and admit that one of the very few times I ever addressed [Wife] with some asperity is when she declared she could not read a map. That's ridiculous. It may not be as easy as parsing Latin for her, but anyone can learn to follow spatial directions). She will survive, although she may wish she had not.

Hosea: As for whether my concerns for [Wife] are patronizing .... Maybe they are. But [D], they are founded on observation. Do you want examples, anecdotes? I mean, most of them are too trivial to bother recounting as stories, except that they add up to a consistent picture when you put them all together in a mosiac. I know [Wife] is an intelligent woman; I know that she has a strongly independent will. I also know that when she gets lost and upset and flustered, she pulls off to the side of the road and telephones me to ask where she is [as if I knew!] and how to get where she is going [ditto!]. This doesn't happen *often* but I think that is partly because she has made a point for the last several years of not driving anywhere that she doesn't already know, if she can possibly avoid it. On the other hand it happened as recently as last summer. I would feel scummy giving you the details, purely because I don't like to spread that kind of story about the woman I love. I'm not very comfortable telling you even as much as I just did.

Do I question her judgment? Yes, sometimes. Not because she is no longer working, but because she has made choices that are bizarre and inexplicable. Not most of the time, of course; but then most of her choices most of the time are routine. And the few that are really out there have been pretty dramatic, which means they may have had a disproportionate impact on my expectations. Again, I find myself in an awkward position here. On the one hand, I feel like I am accused of being irrationally overbearing, domineering, controlling, ... all for no reason, just to gratify some base lust for power or dominion over others. But the only way I know to defend myself against such a charge is by telling you stories that no gentleman would ever tell about his wife, be they never so true. I don't know how to resolve this particular bind, especially since [Wife] is a dear friend of yours. (If you were an anonymous stranger on the Internet, it might actually be easier because you wouldn't know either of us and so it couldn't possibly matter.)

You suggest that I should address this issue "squarely." I don't know how to do that, and I would be terrified to try. A couple years ago, one of [Wife]'s doctors ordered a big batch of psychometric testing done. I forget the exact results now, but they came out showing strong peaks (as always) in some areas, and surprising valleys in others; the "overall" score -- which the tester said upfront was a meaningless index number -- showed "average" intelligence. [Wife] took this number *deeply* to heart, over the repeated objections of the tester not to treat it seriously. And she was suicidal over it. I don't think she actually made any attempts, so maybe "suicidal" is not quite the right word. But she surely *talked* like her life was over, ... as if there was literally *no* value to surviving if she couldn't boast an overall IQ that was significantly higher than "average" ... as if to be "average" (as measured by a meaningless index number on somebody's report somewhere) was the same thing as being consigned to Hell. [D], it was scary. She wept, she moaned, she shrieked. Her mind, she said, was the *only* thing of value she had *ever* had; if it was now "lost" then she had lost all value, and it was time to end it.

She doesn't talk like that any more, but I am still way too scared to open up that particular topic any time soon. This may be cowardice on my part.

D: IQ scores…God, [Hosea], they are terrible. I have asked never to know mine, or my children’s. As [my husband]’s mother wisely said to her son, “Your intelligence is high enough to allow you to do anything you would like to do”. Other than that it’s just a number without significance, much like SAT scores or your GPA or any other single mathematical measure. What matters is the heart, the experiences that shape us, the ability to forgive and re-create, the wit that brings laughter without harm and the music that under girds everything good. I know well enough to know that what you say about [Wife] is true, and I’m as horrified as you. Forgive me for not understanding fully what addressing the subject of her intelligence would mean. Forgive, forgive. I need to stop; tears blind me. Take care; Godspeed.

The plot thickens

I have to add at least three more posts edited from e-mails between me and D. But I had better do it soon, because a lot seems to be happening now in real time and I don't want the narrative thread to get away from me. The last one, at least, will probably be a little long ....

In one respect, I have to admit, it is a good thing that D lives ... well, thousands of miles from us. That means that by sheer geographic necessity, I (we) will be able to put off and mull some big decisions that might otherwise come just a little too fast. But don't let me give away the plot too soon. ;-)

E-mails with D: On truth and tact

I have said that my e-mails with Wife's friend D have lately been covering much of the same territory as my posts here, and they are no easier to write. So it occurred to me (a little belatedly) that I could reprint selections from these e-mails here; it would keep my blog up to date on what is going on with me, without costing me as much effort as it would take to come up with something new.

For these to make sense, though, I have to do a little editing, because we end up pursuing topics like threads. So any coherent post here -- i.e., one about a single topic -- will have to be stitched together out of a paragraph here and another there. I'll try it here and see how it works.

This first one takes its start from a couple of e-mails I already posted here, so I won't reprise them. But you can begin with the remarks I made there about Orson Scott Card, and with D's reply about her sister's Frequent Flyer Miles. To make the alternation between us clearer, I have put my words in green and hers in blue.

Hosea: Thank you for telling me about the frequent flyer miles. Of course I will let [Wife] tell me about this in her own time. Do you have any sense from her if there is a particular reason she hasn't mentioned it yet? Is she afraid I'll be angry, yell, stomp around? Can she just not figure out how to get the topic started? Or is it something as simple as that we don't have a lot of time together in the evenings before she falls asleep?

D: You have analytically presented all of the justifications [Wife] uses to explain why she has not discussed her trip to [the Old Country] with you. I'm not sure how to respond to such Olympian emotional distance, but you may be dissembling here...and I'm not sure why. In the valley, it strikes me that that she may have every reason to believe that you would react with anger; only someone who truly did not care about their marriage would be indifferent. I surely don't need to review the arguments, both for integrity, and for sexual reasons, why multiple partners, particularly for women, has never been accepted easily in any culture, and never in the West.... That does not mean that affairs are rare; they are not, but the conduct of an affair is quite different than that of a marriage, and involves large amounts of discretion and privacy. For [Wife] to discuss her relationship with [Boyfriend 5] openly with you has always seemed rude and even cruel. I cannot and will not justify it --not because I have particular religious scruples against [Wife] accepting the role of mistress, but because she does not seem to understand what that role of necessity requires. Privacy is a lost art, and takes a tremendous amount of maturity and conscious cultivation without being secretive (which is not the same at all). It means accepting boundaries graciously, and learning how to be deeply self-reliant. It is one way -- not the only way -- to learn how to be a woman.

Hosea: I am not quite sure what you mean by "Olympian emotional distance." Distance? Me from [Wife]? Me from her affairs? What would you rather expect to see instead? This is her ... well, let's see, it's a little hard to count. She has had 5 physical affairs that I know about, at least one of which lingered on and off for most of a decade. When I count 5, that is not counting [Boyfriend 5] because they have never met in the flesh yet; but you can make it 6 if you want to add him. I can think of at least two other emotional affairs that involved (as far as I can tell) no sexual contact -- and one of those two involved no impropriety of any kind, but was just a deep and hopeless love she had for a [married and totally faithful] coworker. But the upshot of numbers like this is that I can't allow myself to feel each and every one with full intensity all the time. That way madness lies. I have to draw a line somewhere. So yes, each of them hurts; but no, I am not going to allow myself to fall into the depths of agony each time, knowing that there have been this many in the past and will be more in the future. If that is "Olympian emotional distance" then so be it; I call it exhaustion and self-preservation.

The upshot is that I see this whole situation differently from you, in several important ways. You see that any husband in my position has every reason to get angry ... maybe even should get angry; that it is rude and cruel for [Wife] to discuss her boyfriends with me; that an affair requires cultivating privacy and tact as if they were arts. I won't quarrel with the last point, but I do quarrel with the first two. The fact is that I would rather know the truth, even if it hurts me, than be lied to. This is just very basic. Would I prefer it if [Wife] were happy with me and needed nobody else in her life? Well sure, of course. I'd prefer an end to world hunger, too, but just wishing for it doesn't get me very far. And if I can't get what I want by wishing for it, I would at least rather know the facts. Then -- when I have asked to be told the truth -- it is also up to me to react in a way that encourages I will also be told the truth next time. So I can't just fly off the handle, or I shut down the possibility of truth between us. And I think knowing the truth is more important than flattering my own personal ego with happy lies.

This means that by my lights, it is important that I not* get angry, and it is important that [Wife] feel comfortable discussing her boyfriends with me. It may be a counter-intuitive picture. It is not an altogether comfortable one. I just don't see a better picture that is founded on reality instead of wishful thinking.

Let me add here and now that I do not prescribe this for other people, or other marriages. This is where I personally find myself. I have no idea what is right for somebody else.

D: You and I differ on the value of “truth”. I really meant what I said about privacy and tact. There’s very little I value more. And for all the reasons you so eloquently suggest [in a later part of your last e-mail], that no gentleman should tell [degrading] stories about his wife and because to do otherwise is to violate every aspect of decency and honor. There is nothing about brutal honesty except wilderness and isolation. There isn’t any humanity or truth as we are to really comprehend it, as a shining and cleansing virtue. To truly be adult means to understand that there is ever so much that respectful silence has to offer. Only young people, with all the exuberance of youth, think honesty is always the best policy. It is not. Your goodness and hesed will not keep you from being used and abandoned. Re-read your first paragraph and understand why I wince at the end. You are not exhausted and interested in self-preservation. You are hurt and angry and close to despair. There are no Olympian heights for you -- would we have anything to say to each other if there were? -- and to fail to see the irony behind my statement is to miss my point entirely.

Hosea: Yes, I think we disagree on the value of truth, but rather than put the quotes around truth I would put them around value. I don't think truth has only a single value. Rather, I think truth has different values for different people, at different times, in different circumstances. There is a certain kind of boorish person who will say the most appallingly crude things to people at the most inopportune times, and then claim the excuse that everything he said was "true". Well maybe it was, but that doesn't excuse him and I don't think the "value" of truth rescues him even a little bit. But when I talk about wanting to know the truth -- even the most painful truths -- about the woman I love and the bond we share, that's different. In that case, I don't think that the truth is boorish or brutal or wild or isolating. At worst it is a kind of spiritual discipline ... for both the teller and the listener. For the teller, it is a discipline of courage: "Can I ever find the strength to tell him THIS or THAT?" And also of faith or trust: "After I've told him THIS, then what happens to me?" For the listener, it is a discipline to hear these hurtful things and to stand up under them, not to be crushed by them, and to continue loving the teller in spite of them all. What I hope for, when I want to create a space in which [Wife] feels safe to tell me the truth, is (1) that she gain the courage, step by step, to face the demons that haunt her, by naming them without fear; and (2) that she see that I still love her in spite of it all ... so that she can feel safer with me and with herself.

That's as far as we have gotten with this particular thread at the moment. More later, I am sure.

Ethernet love, ethereal love, ephemeral love ....

I was browsing through other people's blogs the other day, and found one by Morpheus on blogging itself, and how to "succeed" at it. The post started off unsurprisingly enough by saying "Most popularly, 'winning' is about recognition, and measured by numbers. Hits, comments, links...," and then proceeded to list a number of ways one can increase traffic on one's own site. The important part, however, was the very end; this post concludes by saying, "But, right now, I'm happy with what I've got. If you like reading it, I'm happy too. But - and I apologise in advance for this - it's not the most important thing to me right now."

So naturally I started to wonder: what is the most important thing to me right now -- I mean, as far as blogging is concerned? What do I want to get out of my blog? Fame and fortune? Recognition for my pithy articulation and brilliant insight? The praise of adoring crowds and the love of beautiful women? Well, of course any of these would be immensely flattering, and I am sure my vanity would turn backflips for it all. (My vanity is pretty much the only part of me that is still limber enough to turn backflips these days.) But I think the reality would pall pretty quickly. Keeping up with all that would be a lot of work, and not really what I signed up for. It is true that back when I first created the blog and nobody had found it yet, I was pretty desperate to be noticed; only a long habit of talking to myself kept me at it until the day when I finally had other people to write for. But ultimately, if I think about it long and hard, I remember that the real reason I started this blog was in order to find a few people with whom I could discuss things that I really can't discuss at the office, or with the family over Thanksgiving dinner. If I find people with whom I can talk like this -- and I have -- then I have achieved my goal.

And of course, in the process of talking to these people and reading their blogs about their lives, we become friends. It is a special kind of friendship, of course. We never have each other over for dinner; we can never trade simple favors like babysitting; we don't even know each other's real names, for heaven's sake! But we know something about each other's lives; and while we can't discuss common friends or common problems at the office, and we generally don't discuss work or politics, nonetheless we do discuss things that are of critical importance in our lives that we can't talk about anywhere else. And that's important. It generates a kind of tender concern for each other. I know I find myself engaged in the stories other bloggers tell. When things go wrong for them, I try to think whether there is anything I have learned in my own experience which could help. By the same token, I am touched -- maybe unreasonably so -- when another blogger I care about asks after my well-being.

This line of musing would probably never have gone anywhere special, had it not intersected with another e-mail from Wife's friend D the other day. My e-correspondence with D has gotten quite extensive all of a sudden, ever since I started discussing with her some of the same things I've discussed here. (The news of Wife's affairs was no news, because D had long known about all the old ones. Wife even told her about Boyfriend 5 before I did. This is why I felt it was safe to talk with her.) Anyway, we were talking about Wife's romance with Boyfriend 5, and I tried to explain why I thought the whole thing is a lie start to finish. Part of my point is that he lies to Wife by telling her he lives in the Old Country when I am (at this point) quite certain he lives in the American Midwest. But I went farther than this, in the heat of rhetorical passion, and wrote:

" ... it saddens me that she feels so trapped that she has to find refuge in Fantasyland. And there is no way I can see the relationship with [Boyfriend 5] as anything else. EVEN IF I did not have reason to believe that he lives in [the Midwest] and not [the Old Country]; EVEN IF I did not conclude from this lie that he is callously and cold-bloodedly spinning this yarn to manipulate her for reasons of his own; I would STILL have to say that no relationship is real so long as it exists only via the Internet. Suppose (for the sake of argument) that every single word he has typed to her is sincere; he still can't show all of himself. Nobody can. We all filter what we type, even if only unconsciously. No-one can know what it is really like to live with someone else without actually doing it."

That was Monday. Tuesday, D replied in part:

"Let's start with your trenchant discussion about the fundamental fantasy of an enduring and genuine love between two people who have never met. Most of the time, if asked, I [would] disagree with your argument; I think written words are easily able to sustain a love relationship, and history will surely came to my aid here. People were separated for years, or never met at all, and yet they loved each other through letters and the power of words."

And of course she is right. What else, after all, is the blogging community if not a group of people who know each other only through the Internet (well, with a few exceptions like Coquette and Infidel, or Titus and Cate), and who share -- through their common concern for each other -- a kind of love? True, it is a specialized kind of love, and for the most part (again with a few exceptions -- some of the same ones, in fact) it is more philia than eros. But the basic point is that D is right, here, and I am wrong.

Now, I was trying to get at something substantive; what happened was that (as usual) I got carried away with my own words and overstated my point, thus missing the target. What I was trying to say is that when you know somebody purely through the Internet, there are petty irritations that get filtered out: fidgeting, nose picking, farting, bad habits, bad temper -- these are things that generally don't make their way over the ethernet. What you get at the far end, therefore, is less the person as he really is than the person as he would like to be (or as he would like to be seen).

In one sense this can be a good thing. If you want to communicate mind to mind, or soul to soul, it might actually be easier without all the other noise on the line. But you have to keep in mind at least three basic cautions:

1. Without the extra warning cues that we get from physical presence, an Internet acquaintance can go off the rails pretty easily. I have said it is easy for us to get engaged in the events of someone else's life, just by reading about it; this kind of quick intimacy might lead Blogger X to think himself on closer terms with Blogger Y than he really was, and to say or write something presumptuous or strongly unappreciated as a result.
2. If you really fall for someone on the Internet and decide you want to continue or extend the relationship in real life, you have to remember that all the stuff which has been edited out of the picture up till now suddenly applies. Whether it is fidgeting or farting or something a lot more unsavory, in real life you have to deal with the whole package, and not just the text version.
3. And of course, large-scale falsification is way easier on-line than it is in person, because you can say "I am writing you from the Antarctic" without having to procure even a single pair of winter boots as evidence. This is exactly the kind of falsification that I think Boyfriend 5 is practising on Wife. D writes in disbelief that, "Frankly, I cannot imagine deceiving anyone on the level you think is happening to [Wife]. Mentally, it's like walking into a plate glass window and watching it shatter; it's that kind of horror." I wish I thought she were right, of course. But we've been over all that before.

So where is the "Pithy Thoughtful Conclusion" button on this keyboard, anyway? How did I get this far into something and not know how I was going to end it? Can I just plead that it is late and I'm foggy? Does friendship allow me to presume so far?