D was on the phone with Wife the other day, and got the latest installment in the saga.
Friend (who knows everything there is to know about Boyfriend 5) told Wife that Boyfriend 5 has been having a lot of trouble with pain lately (because of his various illnesses), so he has gotten re-addicted to opiates. He knows that Wife would never accept this in him, so he secretly checked himself into a methadone clinic where he will be totally incommunicado for eight years. (I don't make this stuff up, I just write it down.) Wife told D this means she'll have to postpone eloping with Boyfriend 5 until he is out, eight years from now. Then she mused, "I guess it wouldn't really be fair to Hosea ... taking the best years of his life and then leaving him completely bereft and desolated by running off with Boyfriend 5." D, for her part, was wondering, "Why would you make plans to run off with somebody that you don't even know is real?"
Wife also told D that Friend has trouble keeping his stories straight. Wife is starting to wonder (so she says) whether Friend could be delusional. "He tells me he suffres from Asperger's Syndrome ... could that make him hallucinate some of this stuff?" (No it couldn't, D thinks to herself. Asperger's is a whole different thing.) Apparently she has not considered the idea that this is all fiction. That's just one of these rotten ideas that Hosea suggests.
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Eight Years !! Well, at least we know wife (and I hope I'm saying this kindly, forgive me if I'm not) has some extraordinary limits to her credulity. Ex-freaking-traordinary...
Could make an interesting book in itself: the vampire magician freedom fighter hiding out in the methadone clinic.
All I can think is that she doesn't want to believe that she could have been deceived so profoundly. All these boyfriend 5 stories have so many hanging threads, if she pulled on just one the entire fabric of their 'relationship' would unravel. I think she realises that if she starts to question just one of the crazy claims, she'd have to start questioning all of them.
In a way, this is progress. If she's at least wondering if 'Friend' could be delusional, she's starting to express, however tentatively and imperfectly, the capacity to start doubting some of this.
I can't even imagine the profound humiliation a person would experience on realising she'd been so thoroughly gullible. Naturally she'd be resistant to acknowledge it. It's not very different from people who are victims of financial scams or other conmen, who don't want to accept what happened to them.
I think she should be encouraged to find any reason to doubt 'Friend', even if they're wrong and face-saving reasons at first, like this Aspergers/delusional idea. At least it shows she's starting to notice a hanging thread, so to speak.
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