Sister Failure on New Year's Eve

I'm sick. I don't know why. I haven't seen
A doctor -- just gulp pills of no clear pow'r.
My father treats his colds with Scotch and sleep,
But alcohol just makes my stomach sour.

My cell phone doesn't work. I don't know why.
It says to "Check the SIM card" -- but not how.
I guess the store could fix it; haven't tried.
In fact I don't know where that store is now.

My girlfriend writes me letters filled with news,
And all her thoughts: on God, ... marriage, ... affairs,
I've nothing to say back; it's like at work,
Except at work there's no-one really cares.

"Oh, Sister Failure, say a word to me!"
I'm not sure, but I think she whispered "Peace."

Meditation on marriage, 3. Marriage as education.

D responded to my long thoughts about one-ness and two-ness with her own rather extended meditation. I won't repost it all, because it is quite long and there are stretches I'm not sure I understand yet. But one remark of mine that she picked up was the part about marriage's educative effects. She wrote:

You are right to say that marriage is a tremendous education.... I also agree with you that marriage is not so much the outcome of love, sex, or maturity, but the most available road for most people. Marriage is the next logical step in human development after childhood and youth and to marry is to invite growth, which in turn encourages more growth and a wider field.... Marriage and family are the natural extension of the human condition and whether the marriage is happy or unhappy may not be as important as the fact that it completes your growth. And then what? Do you end your marriage or fall into a pattern of routine and boredom?

There is an alternative, but it is hard. I think one of life’s major challenges is to put off what is outgrown, even when it was true in its day and has served us well.... To fail of that is to fail, period, and that failure is bitter, because it is unnecessary. Each individual can change this, but we often refuse to do so. When we can say, “I choose to do this,” or “I find the world exciting ,” rather than ,”He mistreated me,” or “She never understood me,” we will be adults and capable of true love.

When marriage has fulfilled its promise of rounding out personality, it is easy to say that we have fallen out of love, or were never in love in the first place, or that one partner has betrayed the other. These charges may be true or not. What really needs to be considered is that here we both are, stuck with a self, and needing to decide what is to be done with it from this point on. How we arrived here is much less important. Sometimes I think I have found an answer in my work, or in caring for others, but these are no substitute for genuine love. The real challenge is not to give up, and I know that possibility is very much with me.

In my reply I tried to restate this back to her, to be sure I had understood what she was telling me. She has not yet answered whether I got it right or not, so the possibility remains that I am completely confused. But what I think I hear her say here is pretty interesting.

Your letter develops a remarkable theory, one that truly I have never heard before. I don't know if I agree with it ... and in fact I really can't tell yet, because it involves a way of looking at things that is so new that I will have to try it on for a while before I can tell what I think. What I'm referring to is your theory about why marriages (sometimes) decay. You start from my observation that marriage is tremendously educational (although I think I might have said only that it "can be" educational, or at any rate that mine has been). But you proceed from there to say that this is part of the meaning of marriage -- part, if you will, of the design or intent or purpose of marriage, that it further our education in how to live a human life as a man or woman, respectively. The consequences of this shift are enormous. Hundreds of people, after all, have spilled gallons of ink on the question why marriages (often, perhaps even usually) go stale. Some people write as if the spouses themselves are doing something wrong. Others -- for example, Ryan & Jetha in Sex at Dawn -- argue rather that we are simply made for sexual variety, that we need it almost like we need food; so that monogamy cannot help but end in monotony ... and that it then cannot help but finally terminate in a celibacy like that of brother-and-sister. But you, if I understand you correctly, propose an altogether different theory. It is simply this: marriage is designed to be part of our education. Therefore, when we have mastered the lessons it has to teach us, we naturally get bored. Who wouldn't get bored, after all, if he were forced to repeat fifth-grade math every year until he graduated from college?

I see one easy objection to this theory, but it is just as easily met. The objection is: if marriage is like math class, then why don't all (or nearly all) spouses get bored at exactly the same rate? Most fifth-grade teachers teach the same stuff in math class; and most students have mastered it by the end of the year. So why don't we see all (or nearly all) marriages ending in one, five, seven, ten years ... whatever the number is, why isn't it always the same number?

The easy answer is that while marriage is a part of our education, the number of lessons it is designed to impart can be open-ended. It all depends on who the partners are. What I mean is that there are a few lessons that are common to all marriages everywhere, ... or at least all marriages that more or less match what you and I mean by "marriage." But this is a class where the Teaching Assistants have broad latitude to assign extra credit -- sometimes lots of it. If the partners are intelligent, interesting, and engaged, then in addition to learning lessons about interrelationship or parenthood, they might teach each other lessons about community service or long-term mentorship or ... gosh, any number of things. And so they might interest each other longer, by learning more from each other. (And naturally that interest might carry back into the bedroom as well.) And if not, not. But in any event, the absolutely critical part (and what is fundamentally new) is the assertion that if and when husband and wife lose interest in each other, it is not because either of them has failed, and it is not because they are fighting a fundamentally recalcitrant inner nature. It is rather because they have succeeded in doing what they were supposed to do, and so now the time has come to move on to the next class.

At any rate, that's what I think you are saying. And it is, truly, a radical rethinking of what marriage is about. It will take me a while to flesh out the implications of this vision, ... all but one. One of them is obvious: if the disinterest which a long-term couple feels for each other is a sign of success rather than failure, they should greet it with a kind equanimity or even joy, rather than sorrow. This in turn has to mean that they should support each other in whatever steps are necessary to graduate into the next grade and the next set of classes. In our society the way it is built today, that means welcoming a no-fault divorce; but honestly in many cases (not mine) a legal divorce might be a wasteful and inefficient way of proceeding onto the next class. What might serve many couples better (assuming the marriage was healthy to begin with ... unlike mine) might be some kind of recognition or permission that after X years it is simply time, quietly and tactfully and with no legal fuss or bother, to look abroad. After all, no fifth-grade teacher resents it when his or her students pass on to sixth grade ....

Meditation on marriage, 2. Oneness and twoness.

During the course of our discussion about privacy, D began musing about my reference to the practicalities of marriage. She even suggested that one of the awful parts about my marriage to Wife was precisely that Wife had "tyrannized" over me with all the practical, administrative headaches of day-to-day, thus killing off any romance. D tried to argue, on the contrary, that daily practicalities shouldn't contradict the more romantic side of any relationship, arguing that there is nothing incongruous about a mistress ironing a shirt or planning a dinner party. Well, that hadn't been the point I was making, and I think the true story of my marriage is more complex than that. But I also thought that this wasn't the perspective I was trying to communicate. So I wrote back to D as follows:

When I think about the differences between an affair and marriage, interestingly enough, the practical side of marriage isn't the first thing that springs to mind. Or to put it another way, I think there is nothing incongruous with an affair about your skill at ironing a shirt or putting together a dinner party. No, where I see the biggest difference is in the contrast of one-ness and two-ness, so to speak. To put this another way, in a marriage you are (generally) creating not just a life (as a man or woman) but a household; and that household itself will have its own way of life. So in one way or another, the two of you need to settle on that: either by compromise, or by one giving into the other, or something. (Sometimes the accommodations can be a little nuts: I remember one coworker telling me in all seriousness, "Well I'm a cat-person and my wife is a dog-person, so we settled on birds.") This drive towards one-ness affects a lot of things: what surroundings you choose, how you spend your money, and so on. And while there can be allowances made where each spouse can retreat into "his" or "her" private space from time to time, still the dominant personality is the corporate person of the marriage or the household itself, as a unit. As a one-ness.

I'm not saying this at all well, or at all articulately, but that is where I think I see the biggest difference. In an affair, the two retain their two-ness. You and I share many things in common: we both love books, we both (for now) live with cats, we both ... [fill in the blank]. But as long as what we share is an affair and not a marriage, we can share the commonalities without having to adjust the differences. Oh in some ways we will -- in truth, perhaps even in the deepest ways. If I hold one opinion and you hold the opposite, I have to stop and walk around my opinion, to rethink it. In the end I may decide I was wrong, and I would never have rethought it without the question or challenge raised by your disagreement. But where a difference proves to be a pure difference, it doesn't have to be ironed flat to be made the same. Again, I'm not saying this right: I know that in reality there is no mandatory compulsion in marriage to make all differences the same. Of course not. But the common identity of the couple or the household -- seen almost as a third person in some weird way -- does have a magnetism or pressure to it that I think does not manifest the same way in an affair.

Now that I think about it (and I didn't realize it this way before tonight), that may be related to what is special about discussing money. Your mileage may vary, of course. But I think that, for me at least, having to come to a common agreement about how to allocate our mutual money fairly between us (to pay for a visit, for example) feels eerily close to the situation where it is no longer your money or my money but the relationship's money. And that, in turn feels very close to setting up a one-ness, not a two-ness. Since I have not been well-served in the past by handing over my money to such a one-ness -- not your fault, not anything to do with you, but my experience all the same -- I think I have gotten unreasonably skittish on that score. But it may be a while before I unlearn that behavior.

D's answer was long and lyrical -- I had some trouble just now figuring out how to edit it -- but I think she kind of missed the point I was trying to make.

I'm not sure quite what to make of your one-ness v. two-ness discussion, but I find it fascinating. It seems as though the cruelest injury inflicted on marriage is administration, if I can use that word to characterize what you mean by setting up a household. I'm not sure how to respond to the stifling way you present marriage; I suppose rejection is the only option. It sounds... well, so young. I don't mean that your concerns are immature, but they seem awkward in middle-age. Perhaps a young wife can present herself as a helpmate, promising to build a castle of comfort and love for her spouse and to be all things to him, wife, mother and sisters, but no mature woman would dare to be so presumptuous. Such a woman has no idea how to be loved, and there is no imagination or creativity in the one-ness you describe.

Perhaps it comes down to having different clocks. I certainly am not worried about tomorrow with you.... Dragging around the future wears a person down, just as Wife's past wears her down and limits any possibility of joy and delight today. I'm not convinced that a marriage has to be a wholly planned economy.... All relationships are subject to two threats: a foreseeable end and fragmentary presence, which might discourage us, but in fact they intensify the mood, not in some desperate attempt to hold on to the other, but in recognition of humanity's covenant with time. The one-ness you describe seems to be some covenant to extort foreverness from God's insistence that all things are fleeting,and nothing is really ours. A marriage, just like an affair, does not have to ask for security against the world's fate. We can embrace it, knowing that our fate gives our union vitality and beauty it would not otherwise have. No imposition of an institutional one-ness will hold back the dark, and perhaps only the married can pretend otherwise.

Hosea, my desire to be with you does not deny my awareness that being with you is both a homecoming,and an appreciation that you are so different from me that you open a as many windows as my advent calendar holds in anticipation of the savior's birth.... The one-ness imposed by marriage is no valid excuse to resign from living, to get one's views and opinions second-hand or to avoid the hard work of finding out who one is or may become. that said, marriage cannot help but contract one's horizons in some measure. One is no longer looking for a mate or sexual partner, but that ought to free one to look in other directions, to explore whatever captivates the spirit. It seems to me that a decent marriage could liberate your energies to discover your real work, which certainly does not mean re-ordering your spouse's life! Structure and order, if done well, could be as beautiful as a flower arrangement and demand the same meticulous care. Does a marriage demand that you fall in love with the ordering process and thereby smother the relationship in logistics and money management? Maybe, but I remain more optimistic....

To be your mistress demands that I have to be a whole person, with personal accomplishments of my own. The institutional aspects of marriage do not have to limit that possibility; the truth is that to claim your personal inheritance is work. To renounce personal growth and passionate love for the "one-ness of marriage" is to make a mistake; it's not giving as much as giving up. The world is still teeming with life and treasures; our task is to receive whatever we can from the Creator. We are commanded to multiple our talents, not bury them in a hole because God is a 'hard master'. Study something, learn something, care for something, risk...in marriage or an affair, the challenge is the same.

So I tried to clarify by starting again in a different way:

As for the discussion about marriage ... you know, I had the feeling, as I was writing down my thoughts about one-ness and two-ness, that I was saying it in a jumbled and incoherent way -- and it's true, I must have been. I realize this because I don't actually disagree with anything you say in response; but I think that you may be answering what I wrote rather than what I was trying to write. (smile) That my ideas were something of an inchoate fog to begin with didn't help anything, of course.

So what was I trying to say? Maybe I can start with what I wasn't trying to say, and build from there. I wasn't trying to talk about the end of personal growth; the one-ness that I have in mind is fully consistent with both partners accomplishing things on their own, mastering different areas on their own, learning new things, and growing independently of each other. Even if you and I married, I could certainly imagine an afternoon where I sat reading about Plato while you sat reading about modern history; then as we made and ate dinner, we would share what we had learned with each other, ... and might even find the most remarkable points of connection between two subjects that look on the surface almost totally unrelated. Nor was I really trying to talk about housework and bills and the "administrative" side of setting up a household. The word "household" was probably a bad choice, in fact, precisely because it does conjure up these administrative images. What I was really looking for was a noun to describe the one that had been made out of two: perhaps I should have said "couple" instead.

What I was trying to describe was something that I think is an inherent, inescapable part of the logic of marriage itself, and which is not necessarily a bad thing. In marriage, there really is a sense in which two become one. And this happens in the process of making hundreds of routine decisions. One spouse wants pets and the other doesn't. One spouse likes to have fresh flowers around and the other doesn't really care. One spouse wants to write a check out of the common bank account to buy This; the other would prefer to buy That. And all these decisions are negotiated one way or another. I assume that most of the time, in healthy marriages, the decisions are made lovingly, considerately, and with no hard feelings. They may be made with only minimal awareness that there was ever a disagreement at all, especially if each spouse rates the other one more important than some ephemeral decision about decor or groceries. And yet, at the end of the day, decisions are made. At the end of the day, either the couple has a new pet ... or they don't. Either they have fresh flowers in the house ... or they don't. Either they bought This, or they bought That ... or neither, or both. And so on. And there are hundreds of these decisions, these choices -- little bitty ones, for the most part. Hardly worth noticing. Only ... it is by my choices that I define my character. So the sum of all these choices will, over time, build up a recognizable character. That character won't be quite the same as either spouse individually, unless one spouse is so controlling that he gets his way 100% of the time. (In most marriages, that's unlikely.) So it won't be either one separately, but it will nonetheless be a very definite character, ... a character that might as well be seen as a person, a unique person, some third person who is neither the husband nor the wife but the Couple taken together organically as if they were one. Those hundreds of choices will, over time, add up to define the character of the marriage. And it is this character, this "third person" who is the one-ness I was talking about.

This "third person" isn't the same as either spouse. I didn't mean to suggest that the two partners submerge all their individuality to try to become as alike as possible. But in some ways this "third person" is the most important one, because it is "he" (it) who determines what face the couple turns towards everyone else. It is even "he" (it) who determines how the couple raise their children. Are the kids allowed to chew bubble gum? Watch television? Do they have to have regular chores? Do they have to sit down with their parents for regular meals? It is not possible for the parents to enforce different opinions on these questions and still live together. If the parents are divorced, they can say "It's OK to chew gum at Mom's place but not at Dad's place (or whatever)." But as long as they are raising the kids in the same house, they have to come to an agreement. I mean that this is a logical necessity, not a moral exhortation. If one parent wants to enforce a rule that the other parent won't enforce, then ipso facto that is not a valid, enforceable rule. The "third person" -- the character of the Couple -- doesn't accept that rule. So one way or another, the couple makes a decision on each of a hundred questions related to child-rearing. Sometimes the "decision" reached by the Couple as a collective or organic body is different from what either parent would want individually. But one way or another the kids figure out what the real rules really are ... and whatever character those choices add up to define, that's the character of the Couple.

This one-ness is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there is an argument that anybody who has never had to devote himself to some purpose larger than himself, has never grown up. Marriage provides that "larger purpose." For good or ill, the "third person" -- the collective body of the Couple taken together -- is bigger than either spouse individually. So even those who have never done ten minutes worth of service for an army or a church or a school or any other community you can name, ... even they can have the experience of working for (or "serving") someone (the Couple as a collective, organic entity) bigger than themselves. It is exactly this feature which makes marriage such a powerful educator. It is exactly this that makes me say that if I had stayed single, I would be just as immature today as I was at the age of 21. So it is not a bad thing. Obviously there are some ways that it didn't work out so well for me personally, but that was a kind of accident; it wasn't anything built into the logic of mariage as such.

So when I contrasted the freedom of singleness with the unfreedom of marriage, that was meant to be more neutrally descriptive than evaluative. There are some ways in which too much of the wrong kinds of freedom can be very destructive; as a result, I think we have to recognize that freedom itself is not always, in every situation, an unqualified good. It all depends on what kind of freedom and what the alternatives are. But sometimes (and I think that healthy loving marriages are examples of this) less freedom can make everyone better off than more freedom would.

Yes, it so happens that these days I find freedom looks a lot more attractive than it once did. But again, as I said, that is kind of an accident applying to me in the here-and-now.

The whole discussion started when we talked about our friend, whose counselor told her to read her fiance's back e-mail. You said that for her to read all that stuff was sad and out-of-line. I agreed 100% with "sad" but I demurred at "out-of-line," saying that it would indeed be out-of-line for an affair but that it might not be so wrong in a marriage. I'm not sure I can spell out my thoughts completely, but I think this one-ness ... this "third person" ... this collective, organic character which is the Couple independent of either spouse individually ... I think that this is somehow at the heart of my sense that reading private e-mails is not necessarily wrong in a marriage. The point is that the two of you are part of one body, a body larger than either one of you alone. Any decision that either of you makes will -- almost inevitably -- affect the other in a direct and immediate way. And if the other is going to be affected, he or she has the right to know about it. My left hand has a right to know what my right hand is doing, because they are both going to have to live with the results. And so marriage requires -- at least in principle, and at least potentially -- far greater transparency than any affair. The two partners may read different books, excel at different things, grow in different ways ... but they have to know what to expect from each other. There is still plenty of room for privacy-in-the-sense-of-autonomy, but I think in the end there is less room for privacy-in-the-sense-of-concealment.

If this were a speech and I were striving for a stirring rhetorical finish, I'd stop there. But in the interests of philosophical exactitude, I have to at least hint at two massive qualifications to the preceding paragraph.

The first qualification is an easy one: it answers the question, "OK Hosea, does this mean you should be transparent to Wife about our love for, and involvement with, each other?" The answer is, "No, but then Wife and I are no longer married except in the legal sense of the word, so the whole argument doesn't apply. My legal decisions will affect her. Some of my economic decisions might affect her. But my emotional decisions can't possibly affect her, because that bond has already been broken. So if I wanted to buy another house, or move to Libya and surrender my American citizenship, she'd have a right to know all about that. But our affair? Nope."

The second qualification is more difficult. But what about the infidelity-blogger community? Am I condemning my friends for not telling their spouses? No, but it is a little hard to explain why not. Let me say rather that all of us in the community are (to greater or lesser degree) walking a highwire. If we manage not to fall, and if everyone can live happily ever after, ... then that's great. We've dodged the bullet. And in that case it is possible that all the spouses will be happier not knowing. But it is so easy for this to go wrong ... for a seemingly innocuous dalliance to end in heartbreak and ruin. And if that's what's gonna happen ... well shucks, in that case maybe it would have been useful for the other party not to have been blindsided by it. I don't mean to speak ill of my friends here. But I am trying to say (and I think it is undeniable) that affairs can be very risky. All I can say is that I also think the other members of the community would all agree with that part.

The Consultant has married his girlfriend

I just got the e-mail this morning. He told us (D and me) back here that he had popped the question. The photos show them looking radiant in a church with a Christmas Tree.

Meditation on marriage, 1. Privacy and transparency.

A little over a week ago -- I guess it was not long after I wrote my "Penthouse" post -- D and I began a conversation that turned into a rather interesting and involved meditation on the nature or meaning of marriage. As with all the best conversations, it didn't exactly start that way. Or at any rate, let's say that where we started was pretty different from where we ended up.

It all started when we were discussing a couple we know who is planning to get married. He had a number of indiscretions in his past, and they were proving to be a big hurdle for her. The two of them got some premarital counseling, during which the counselor suggested that he simply give her all his e-mail accounts and passwords, so that she could set her mind at ease about his past. And the last we heard from them, they were on their way to living happily ever after.

D remarked to me, though, that she was a little uncomfortable with this outcome. She wrote me:

I still think that [our friend] is setting herself up for disaster. My thoughts aren't filtered or well organized, but ....

Who we love matters tremendously. As I wrote last night, it shapes our entire life. Our model for love, of course, is God himself, and the essence of God is his mysteriousness.... Yet some of us cannot help but fall in love, deeply and eternally, with the Divine. We are called to be 'inflamed with love' for God, and in doing so, we learn to love others and risk activities that would otherwise leave us trembling in fear.... Worrying about bank accounts, computer passwords and the like is involvement and agitation with low and earthly things. If I was concerned about such matters with you, they would leave me feeling listless and unhappy, not closer but more removed from you.

Sweetheart, Allan Bloom may have been right when he declared that friendship is a higher gift than love.... But for friendship to flourish, neither the friendship nor the friend can be seen as an object to be possessed. If I am to love you, I must also give you privacy and freedom.... Personally, I have also suffered from excessive emotional involvement, when I focus on every comment you make and become clingy and insecure. [Our friend] seems at risk of the same in [some of the stories we heard from the two of them]. That's a danger; if our love doesn't warm others, even those who know nothing of our relationship, there is something wrong.The fire of love can be extinguished by too much attention as well as not enough attention. Above all, there is our passion for truth.... The source of all truth is God himself, and that doesn't mean complete self-disclosure, but rather the knowledge that you are loved, beyond all reckoning, for ever and ever. The union of hearts and minds is the goal, and I staunchly hold that all the 'transparency' our friend is demanding from her fiance will not achieve that union.... I will never know you completely, but I will grow in gratitude for our friendship and love. Goodness...already I feel as though the two years we have shared have been the richest ones I've known. Just one true love and friendship has made all the difference, because for me, you have affirmed that love truly is at the center of existence, no matter where we might find ourselves. One love...and the universe unfolds as it should. I don't need to know your password :-)

Of course at one level this was tremendously flattering to me, and in that respect it was nice to hear. But I also have to admit that it left me feeling a little uneasy. After all, in years past I have certainly snooped into Wife's text messages and e-mail accounts: you know this because I have printed many of the transcripts in this blog, and I have discussed the contents of others. So where did D's remarks leave me? Trying to feel my way here, I wrote back:

I can't help agreeing with you that when you have to start worrying about passwords and accounts and reading e-mails to other people, something important has been lost. Of course, that's the place where I have found myself with respect to Wife -- and it has been for years and years. But that only goes to support my point, that something has been lost by the time you get there. And I think that this loss is somehow (among other things) key to the difference between a romance and a marriage.

Naturally the best marriages are also romances, or at any rate we always hope that they are. But marriage requires far more than romance. Among other things, the real-world practicalities of marriage require -- quite unavoidably -- what you called "involvement ... with low and earthly things." You write that "for friendship to flourish, neither the friendship nor the friend can be seen as an object to be possessed." Absolutely true: but a spouse (even, perhaps, the marriage itself) is in some ways a possession, or else a possessor. Because of the way that marriage functions in our society -- I'm thinking of everything from community property to access to minor children -- it can feel like an obligation to fret over a spouse's online flirtations, to need to know a spouse's password, to check those accounts for incriminating e-mails or photos. Why an obligation? To be prepared in case the spouse goes crazy over this other person with whom he/she has been flirting, and decides to empty all your accounts and take the kids abroad. [And of course there were times I feared Wife would do exactly that with Boyfriend 5.] In a pure romance, by contrast, that kind of worry makes no sense. You can't abscond with my savings or abduct my children. And so I am free to ignore those "low and earthly" considerations, and to pay all my attention to the love we have for each other, to the high quality of our interactions themselves (in person or in writing), ... to the qualities of our souls (and also bodies, I guess) that drew us together in the first place. From the perspective of pure romance, that is a far better place to be.

D's response covered a lot of territory in a very lyrical way, and I'm not sure I understood all of it even now. But her comments about privacy were clear and to the point:

I do know violating someone's privacy as a condition of staying together is wrong on every level. If you don't trust the person to behave with minimal decency, the relationship should dissolve, and that's true for an affair as well as a marriage. I do not admire you for reading private emails and demanding financial information from the woman you decided to stay with. Such behavior seems to diminish everyone involved and is unlikely to prevent mis-behavior from the other party anyway. For example, Wife will lie, cheat on you, and spend money in crazy ways no matter how much you monitor her behavior. You either decide to accept it or you leave. If you really can't trust her to keep your children stateside, the relationship is so far gone as to be unsalvageable no matter how much you spy on her.

I had several thoughts about this. One addressed the practical question of how I should have handled the situation with Wife. Should I really not have read her text messages and e-mails? Really? That part of my answer ran as follows:

I would like to sympathize with the case that you make for not snooping, and at one level I even agree with the fundamentals of what you say; but there are places where I feel I have to demur, albeit gently.

The first such place is the one where I find myself today. You write, "If you don't trust the person to behave with minimal decency, the relationship should dissolve, and that's true for an affair as well as a marriage." I would answer that if you don't trust the other person to behave with minimal decency, then the relationship has already dissolved ... at an emotional level. But the emotional level is not always the only relevant level -- certainly not for a marriage, where there are (minimally) legal and economic levels as well. And of course if children are part of the picture, that adds on still more levels. Now it is possible to argue -- you have -- that in the absence of trust, all those other levels should dissolve too; and in the long term I would agree with you. But doing that takes a while; and it is also possible to argue -- I have -- that sometimes it is necessary to await a propitious moment before setting the dissolution in motion. In between times, there may be practical reasons that it is useful or prudent to keep the legal and economic relationship (for example) even while the emotional one is in tatters. And in that case, I think it can be useful to insist on full transparency as a temporary measure, until the relationship can be terminated properly. In the event that the partner is not inclined to cooperate with such transparency, it can be an act of self-defense to bring it about unilaterally. By snooping. Of course that means that the trust which sustains an emotional relationship is gone. But the legal relationship might still be in place for some time. We have discussed (debated, argued) the advisability of maintaining a legal relationship where there is no emotional support for it, and I don't want to revisit the arguments on both sides right now. Suffice it to say that I can see this situation as a practical possibility, however far it is from any ideal we would either of us want to honor.

But there was another side to my thoughts as well. Do we really have to hide secrets from each other at all? It may be practically necessary, but isn't there something dull and leaden and unromantic about that too? I'm thinking of the same kinds of ideas that were flitting through my head back in 2008, when I wrote this piece here. And so I wrote her:

The only other thing I wanted to say about privacy is that in some ways, compared to the loftiness of which love is capable, it sometimes seems to me a rather sad or low or unfortunate ideal. Or perhaps those aren't quite the right words: let me explain a little more precisely. What I mean by "low" in this context is that privacy, as an ideal -- as something it is "wrong on every level" to violate -- is no more than a necessary concession to our fallen state. In a perfect love relationship -- in the kind of love we hope to experience the other side of Jordan -- privacy should become totally unnecessary, even pointless or irrelevant. In that kind of perfect love, perhaps the way the angels love each other, you should be able to know every single one of my faults and love me anyway; and I, yours and you. That is, after all, the kind of love we already hope for, from the One Who already knows all of our faults better than we ourselves do. You have said that His love for us should be a model for our love for each other. Since there is no room for privacy in His love for us, that makes me think there is something a little sad in the fact that we even need to concern ourselves with privacy here on Earth, at least with respect to those we love most deeply. I know we do. I know we can't abandon privacy, any more than we can walk naked down the streets or make love in the public parks. But there is a small, romantic corner of me which finds that sad.

Of course she demurred at that: privacy is a bigger issue for D than for anybody else I know. But her answer also seemed to me subtly off the point. Only after thinking about it for a while did I come to realize why:

Privacy beyond the River Jordan...perhaps you are right, but somehow, I doubt that we will know the fullness of God, even as resurrected and eternal beings. There is a depth to existence that is divine on the deepest level and so remains somewhat mysterious and beyond analysis. We often mistake privacy for that reality, but perhaps a concern for privacy only protects us from a fundamental arrogance that denies such dignity to another. Totalitarian states remove the right to privacy from citizens in order to privilege the state, but this activity only insures the destruction of millions. For me, to cherish privacy is to honor your humanity; it's to insist that you are separate from me and have your own reason for being that is not subject to my will. Certainly on earth, this seems valuable, although we pray everyday that "...thy will be done, on earth as it is heaven...." One day perhaps all things will be known...but it might be possible to love completely without full knowledge. Jesus seems to have done so, and he freely admitted that he did not know the Father's plan in all respects. We can know now that if we truly love each other, the flaws we do see in the other will be forgiven and accepted. That faith seems possible without reading email and texts sent, or knowing every move made by the other. Personally, I find my trust in you builds my belief in our love...it's not so much what you can do that concerns me, but what you will do that gives me the confidence to love you dearly.

Totalitarian states? What the fuck ...? Are we on totally different pages here?

And then I saw it.

Your last long paragraph about love beyond Jordan has cleared up something important for me. When we talk about "privacy," you and I, we are thinking of subtly different sides of it; and I think that accounts for why we speak about it in different ways. For you, privacy is a concept closely related to autonomy: to preserve someone's privacy inviolate is to accord him the basic respect due a human being, while to deny him privacy is in some sense like making him a slave. But when I wrote you last night, and during all our discussions in the past, I always thought of privacy as closely related to hiding or concealment. So when I wrote about privacy as a "sad" ideal, or as a concession to our fallen state, what I meant was that maybe someday -- across Jordan -- we can be secure enough in a perfect love not to be afraid, even in the dark corners of our hearts ... not to feel compelled (out of fear) to hide or conceal or dissemble, lest we shock or alarm our beloved. I don't imagine that we can know everything, of course; I can't conceive of what that would be like. But I can imagine what complete security might feel like. I think, for example, of how the denizens of Heaven act and speak in The Great Divorce: "I am in Love, and I will not go out of It." (That example just occurred to me now, as I was typing.) Thinking about them some more, I am confident that they all respect each other's autonomy, and yet none of them seems to feel any need to hide or dissemble. So, ... is privacy a relevant concept for them? I think you would say yes, and I would say no. And so we must have been talking about different things all along.

Cool -- I didn't understand that before today. I am glad to see it now.

And it really does interest me to realize that the concept of "privacy" can mean two such very different things.

Narcissus in the suburbs, revisited

I was browsing The Last Psychiatrist a while ago, and I stumbled across a post where he lists the formal DSM criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I found this interesting, even useful, because back when D first suggested to me that what Wife suffers from is narcissism, I had never heard of it. I certainly had no criteria with which to judge if D was right or not. And the couple of times I have mentioned the topic to other people, I have been unable to explain it to anyone's satisfaction.

So here is the list reprinted by the Last Psychiatrist. I have highlighted in red the parts that I think are particularly relevant to Wife:

Here are the DSM criteria for NPD, of which you must score at least five:

• grandiose sense of self-importance
• preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• belief that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• need for excessive admiration
• sense of entitlement
• takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
• lack of empathy
• envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
• arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

And yes, that's five.

Probably I should discuss these and give examples, but it's late and I'm tired. Perhaps later. Meanwhile, I do think the list is awfully interesting ...

"Penthouse Forum" is a voice for family values?

A couple evenings ago, I was browsing the Internet and ran across the most improbable article. It's almost seven years old by now -- maybe the thesis is old hat, and I've just been far enough out of touch that I never heard of it before now. But I just had to pass along the link.

The article is called, "Happily married couples gone wild!" and it amounts to a book review of "Letters to Penthouse XIX." What the reviewer argues is that the main theme of the letters is, "Look what we did to spice up our marital sex lives, thereby solidifying and reaffirming our long-term commitment to each other." Huh? Penthouse? But yes, that's what the reviewer says, and she has the quotes to prove it.

She even goes on to worry that Penthouse may end up being left behind by the modern currents of pornography, as a quaint and antique artifact of a more stable and innocent time. I don't know; I would never have thought up the idea on my own. But it's interesting to read ....

Hated fiercely, loved fiercely

I was talking on the phone to D ... gosh, it was probably a couple of weeks ago ... and she was telling me about the school where she teaches. I've said before that it is a madhouse. The Principal seems to hate her (or fear her), and keeps her on (apparently) only because D is such a damned good teacher. The former Principal once called her opinions "pure evil" in a discussion over educational philosophy. Plainly D arouses strong passions in people -- not just when it's about sex, and not just when she is cleaning up their crap. (See the whole Second Date saga, starting ... oh, let's say about ... here.)

Anyway, she was describing this situation for what seemed like the hundredth time, and then she said something that really caught my attention: "Hosea, I have often felt that I have never been loved as fiercely as I have been hated." Such a simple thing to say, but it really gave me pause.

Right away she added, "Then I think about you, and I think that might not be true after all."

OK, that's flattering to hear. But why me? What makes her think that I love her more fiercely than others have?

As near as I can tell, it's the sex. When we do get time together, I can be shy and retiring on the street but I am intense and demanding in bed, or so I think it must seem to her. D assumes this is the "real Hosea" because it is one of her fundamental beliefs that people reveal their true selves in bed. So if I am passionate and forceful and demanding in bed, she assumes that's the "real Hosea" shining through all the pretense. The ferocity with which I suckle her and fuck her is proof that I -- even, perhaps, I alone -- love her fiercely, ever bit as fiercely as she has ever been hated by her Principal, or by Wife, or by any of the other enemies she has made over the years.

But sometimes I wonder if this belief of hers is really true. How one reveals himself in bed, ... is that truly the "real man"? Yes, I am forceful and passionate in bed with D (far more so than I ever was with Wife). But at work I strive to be mild, inoffensive, reasonable, and accommodating. What makes that personality "less real" than my passion in bed? Of course it is agreeable to be told that one is intense and passionate ... more agreeable than to be told one is a forgettable milquetoast, at any rate. I'd like it to be true. But how does that make it true?

I don't know the answer. On the other hand, I guess it is true that (as D says) I provide some kind of reminder or standing counterexample to her thesis that she has never been loved truly fiercely. That's got to be worth something.

Back on track

After yesterday's letter, it looks like D and I are back on track. She recognizes how close we came to the edge, and she is sanguine rather than sullen. Willing to discuss ideas about how to see each other next without being dogmatic about how we do it, nor wounded at it not happening yesterday. It's all good.

Looking back and looking forward, part 2

When I sent D my e-mail Saturday evening, she replied immediately. But then it took me a couple of days to get back to her.

And, truth to tell, I wasn't quite sure if she had understood what I was saying. Here was her reply to me:

Dearest Hosea,

Thank you for writing. It’s hard to answer such a bleak note, so perhaps I will just let it stand as a warning. I’m not sure how to ‘answer’ it at all. The comparisons to Wife are painful and on one level, perhaps also fundamentally untrue.

Let’s see if I can sift this a bit and illustrate what I mean, because I want to acknowledge some of what you said. It is true that I can ‘hear black’ when you mean white, but the larger contention is not something I accept, and that’s my inability to change, my inability to finally understand. You are wrong about that. You give up far too easily, you back away and I’m left with nothing but confusion and frustration. Where exactly did I go wrong? How can I get him to explain what he thinks again, in terms I might understand? And is it possible that my views, however wrong, are perhaps a legitimate misunderstanding caused by confusion at these particular points? ... [T]he point about change is vital. If I can’t change and see your viewpoint, I am not worth your time, energy or financial resources.

Let me try and provide a tiny snapshot of myself to show you what I mean.... [She then described steadily coaching one of her students to become a better driver.] Sure, I’m a teacher; that’s what I do. But you have the same responsibility towards me ...; you have to break it down for me instead of saying, “I know you don’t understand. It’s not your fault. You can’t understand me.” You have to believe I can master the subject and try again. Stop me and insist that I listen more closely (none of us listen very well; I’m convinced that the reason God does not make himself visible and instead demands that we ‘hear the word of the Lord’ is because no real understanding is possible without repeated attempts to hear). Hosea, without that belief and effort,you are condemned to loneliness far deeper than my empty house and bed and my small, dying community that offers precious few opportunities for real friendship. I own the loneliness, but honestly, the comments you make in the first paragraph of your letter may apply to yourself more than they apply to me. And that’s a new insight.

I agree that taking a break from discussing how to pay for possible holidays is a good idea; you are right to say that sometimes, new understanding resolves what looked like an impasse. My school schedule is easily explained; .... [Then she listed her breaks for the rest of the year.]

Hosea, I do not expect you to be all things to me. We share a suspicion of marriage as an institution and I, like you, prefer to occasionally sail my own ship solo. But that doesn’t mean denying the possibility of understanding, or accepting that our love is very difficult beyond what is true about life in general; it tends to drive you to your knees and frustrate your best attempts to control either your outward circumstances or your inner life. I think you have to have a little more faith in both yourself and me. Very smart people are often very lonely people, and you are no exception.... It does no good to call for more bitterness and rancor; just the opposite is needed if anything worthwhile is going to be accomplished. I would urge you to bring back one of those topics you have declared ‘off the table’ (home ownership is a fine topic) and let me hear your views again. I can’t think of a better gift on these long winter nights…like the ‘littlest angel’, who gave the Christ child his humble box of treasures collected as a child, a stone from the river, a robin’s egg, a butterfly preserved…you might bring me your ideas and let me consider them again. I’m not saying I will always agree, but I know that discussion is far better than polemic or isolation and at its core, far more humane and loving. The Christmas story reminds us that precisely the earthly gifts we present to each other are the most valuable because God created and embraced them, and includes our communication. The efforts we make to understand, forgive and acknowledge each other are far more valuable than…visits and time together, because without the former, the last is just physical presence, and that’s not truly what we want.

Can we try again?

You have all my love, forever and always.
D

I was glad that her letter was so sweet ... that she didn't just get madder for my continuing to delay the job of setting up another visit. But I wasn't quite sure what to say next. Should I just drop the current topic and pick up some older one we had discarded? If I went back to discuss the corner we had just painted ourselves into, could I say anything without it degenerating into whiny accusations? I wasn't sure. So in and around my other duties Sunday and Monday, I mulled this for a while. We exchanged a couple of short notes, each of us making sure the other hadn't fallen off the face of the earth. But they were clearly placeholders.

Then finally today, while I should have been doing something useful or productive at work, I managed slowly to piece together the following letter, as a next step.

Dearest D,

You are right that I give up easily, far too easily. Partly that comes from an intense aversion to conflict. (Shyness? I've always called it cowardice.) Partly I can get skittish around outbursts of intense emotion, at any rate negative emotion. (And yes, I realize that must sound very ironic coming from someone whose outbursts are as noisy as mine.)

But I would never, ever patronize you by saying "You can't understand." Notwithstanding anything I might have said in my earlier letter, you are emphatically not Wife. Of course you can understand. You don't always, and sometimes when I feel particularly skittish or depressed I can despair of finding a way to make you understand. But it has nothing to do with incapacity.

When that happens, though, you tell me to try again. Keep at it, walk around it from a different direction, but don't give up. You say that several times in your letter below, and of course you shouldn't have to say it at all. I should know by now that hanging in there -- not giving up -- is the only thing to do.

So maybe it would be useful for me to give you some of the background behind my letter of Saturday evening -- the one you called so bleak, and that you answered so sweetly [above]. My thought is that it could explain how I got to where I was when I wrote it, and maybe from there we could both understand what was going on a little better.

I had better pause for a moment first, though, and say that this story doesn't show either of us in the best light. Please understand -- please, I am imploring you here -- that nothing I write is meant as criticism or blame. If there is blame to go around, honestly I think the majority of it is mine for not handling the situation in a more proactive or productive way. So I mean the account to be purely diagnostic. I didn't write it before for fear of how it would sound, and only your reassurances below that understanding is the critical thing have persuaded me to write it now. Remember that I love you.

With that said, let me back up to Friday morning. I had gotten an idea Thursday night of a place we might go; and Friday morning (once I got to the office) I set to work online making reservations. I secured the vacation time from my boss, booked the hotel, ... and came within one minute and two mouse clicks of committing myself to a little under a thousand dollars worth of non-refundable travel plans for dates that I had not cleared with you. Fortunately I stopped long enough to read the fine print, and that slowed me down enough to stop and think about what I was doing. I thought ... got up from my chair and walked around my office ... walked down the hall for a cup of coffee ... and thought some more. Finally I came back to my chair and exited the website without giving them my credit card information. I went back and cancelled the hotel reservations (those were refundable) and then tried to take a long look at myself.

Why was I doing it? To prove something, of course. To prove that you were wrong when you wrote that "there are two worries that need to be put on the table. One is my concern that for a myriad of reasons, you prefer to live with Wife.... [And the other is that to] see me without your work paying for much of our expenses changes the equation." But that's crazy, isn't it? Was it really going to "prove" anything positive to you for me to do something so remarkably foolhardy ... especially when you were still adamantly insisting that you would never fly anywhere on tickets I paid for? Was it going to make it better that I hadn't confirmed the dates with you? Really? Wouldn't that just "prove" that I needed my head examined? And -- come to that -- why did I think I needed to "prove" something anyway?

A lot of questions.

So I spent the next two days -- that's Friday and Saturday -- staring at those questions from several different angles. And the longer I looked at it, the wider the scope became, because I was trying to figure out how I had gotten so close to a precipice of such craziness. Pretty soon the question had changed: it was no longer just when to plan a visit or how to pay for it, but whether to see you again at all. Ever. That sounds just as extreme, even just as crazy, as those surprise reservations I was making; but I was shaken by things, and so I started calling everything into question. That's where I was when you wrote me that you were "irritated, but waiting" and "frustrated by what [you saw] as foot-dragging and dithering" while you were "asked to bear most of the burden of separation and silence." [I didn't bother quoting or excerpting this letter. It was part of a sequence of letters that I passed over through brief allusion in the first paragraphs of this post.] Normally -- even a couple of days before -- a letter that sharpish would have wounded me deeply; but by the time I read it I was already so far out in the wilderness that the darts sailed clean past me.

In the end, of course, I came back to myself. Yes, I wanted to see you again. No, I wasn't going to let myself fall off the precipice, in either direction. And that's about the time I wrote my letter Saturday evening. I tried to say very little about the wilderness my mind had been wandering through, but I think some hint of it slipped through in my remark that my attention kept "sliding back to the big picture." I don't know if that was enough for you to understand how far my thoughts had gone ... that I had actually entertained the notion of breaking it all off.

But how did I get there?

I guess the first thing that I see when I try to look at the situation objectively is the feverish volatility of my own emotional reactions. Not that any of this volatility was visible on the outside; on the outside I am sure that I was quiet, placid, ... maybe a little more thoughtful and removed than normal, but nothing else. But inside I was careening from one extreme to another. Incidentally, I think that this may be part of why I withdraw sometimes (perhaps not always): namely, that I have learned to silence my outside when my inside is agitated, until I calm down and come back to myself. I suppose I fear that if I reported regularly on everything that was going on inside, it could sound pretty alarming -- especially since the extremes probably aren't where I will end up when I am done.
What was the trigger, that I was over-reacting to? Plainly it was the discussion of planning a visit; but I think there were several distinct factors in that discussion, each of which contributed its own kick.

• In the first place, our discussions on this topic have always been pointed and difficult, so I had a certain amount of pre-existing apprehension right from the beginning.
• The longer the discussion went on, the sharper and bitterer your voice sounded to me (I do not say this is what you were trying for), and this (perceived) sharpness and bitterness agitated that part of me that is scared of conflict.
• Your letter of Thursday evening, November 4 (that's the "two worries on the table" letter) made me think that you believe two things about me which are fundamentally at odds with the rosy, flattering image I like to cherish about myself: to wit, (1) that my love for you is shallow or fickle or unreliable or meaningless; and (2) that I am a cheapskate. That you could harbor such worries made me feel strongly that I needed to make some chivalric, gallant, extravagant, even desperate gesture -- a "grand geste" -- to dispel your doubts once and for all, forever.
• You didn't seem able to hear anything I said. OK, perhaps at the beginning I should have expected that you would respond to my extreme proposal (to pay all your [travel] expenses [to see me] forever) with another extreme proposal (total financial separation); that much is only natural. But then when I offered a compromise (let's do it this way for a couple of trips and then maybe forget it in the future), you refused to budge. When I said explicitly that dogmatic adherence to principles would torpedo us, you stuck to your guns. And when I said that the one thing above all else I wanted to avoid was having to talk about money, you suggested an approach which would ensure that we had to discuss every penny. I began to feel that one of us was speaking Chinese, and my frustration at not being heard made me -- again -- ever more desperate.
• As a garnish to all this -- it's a tiny thing compared to the rest, but it struck me disproportionately so I have to mention it -- you went on to say that your earlier acceptance of my frequent flyer miles was done with "trepidation." (This was in your letter of Friday morning, November 12.) And of course maybe it was; I can't read your heart. But I would never have guessed it from the tone of our e-mails and phone calls, back in January 2009 after our first two "dates." We discussed my frequent flyer miles quite a lot back then, and the tone as I read it was something I would have called ... well maybe I shouldn't go quite as far as to say "sharpish and demanding," but you were certainly prepared to tell me that you supposed I must not want you to use my miles if I hadn't already gotten off my duff and planned something, so probably I was saving them for some heart-warming trip with Wife and the boys. And by now you know that that kind of sullen sulk hits me like a slap in the face. (You might not have known it back then. Come to think of it, those e-mails sounded a lot like our more recent conversations ....)
• On top of this all, of course I knew that any sharpishness in your tone grew directly out of missing me, that it was all an expression of loneliness. And I didn't want you to feel sad or miserable. I didn't want to be the cause of such an ache. So on top of all the external stimuli, I did also feel guilty at somehow not holding up my part of the bargain ... at leaving you in the lurch.
• Then this last feeling, call it "sympathy" or "pity" or whatever you like, nurtured a growing feeling of obligation. And I think a sense of obligation is somehow poisonous to an affair. Of course, we can't help but build up webs of mutual obligation with those we love -- and that's true for all kinds of love. But when I realized that the experience was starting to feel like marriage -- and that there may have been some connection between that feeling and my willingness to engage in recklessly irrational spending just to make a point -- well, that's part of when I began to step back and re-evaluate the whole thing: "If this is just going to turn into another marriage, who needs it ...?"

Those are the elements I can tease apart. They all overlap and bleed into each other, of course. There may be more, that I haven't put my finger on.

Please remember that I don't say any of this by way of blame. I repeat that if there is blame to be allocated, the lion's share is mine: I know how alone you are, I know that it is hard to have anything to hang onto when there isn't a date in the future, and I know that nobody deals with indeterminacy very well. Knowing all of that up front, I should either have scheduled something right away or else said clearly, "Look, I don't know when it will be but not for a while." And I didn't. That you got frustrated with this situation should surprise nobody.

Are there lessons we can learn for next time? I look at all the points above, and I can think of only two. One of them is that I need to remember -- for my own sake -- just how skittish and volatile my own emotions can be. (I assume you already know this better than you want to.) The other is that I need to find some kind of flag I can wave when it feels to me like you haven't heard me, or like you are answering something different from what I said, or something like that. If there are particular words I can use or ways to go about it, that would help. Maybe it would be enough for me just to say "Please slow down because I feel like you haven't heard me." I am sure that the times I most need to say it are the times I will be least willing to, because I'll already feel skittish or depressed, because I'll already be backing away into a wilderness. This is where courage comes in, and trust. I recognize that I need to exercise both those virtues more than I have. I'll try harder next time.

You end your letter by talking about our efforts to understand, forgive, and acknowledge each other, even going so far as to call them more important than ... time spent together. (I thought your use of ellipsis was very tasteful, by the way. smile) Thank you. I'm grateful you did. I hope what I have written here helps with the understanding. Somehow I can't think of this letter as the kind of "gift" you had in mind "for these long winter nights" ... some gift, huh? But maybe, even if it is hardly the kind of gift you thank Santa for, ... maybe it can help.

As for forgiveness, ... well on my side I am no longer mad, no longer upset, no longer raving in the wilderness. I no longer think about the situation in terms of accusation or blame. I hope that counts for something. Acknowledgement? Gosh, we are who we are. I can see how this flare-up grew directly out of us being who we are. In that sense, looking back on it, we shouldn't think it a surprise. But we can learn from it and do better next time.

As ever, we can always hope.

I love you, and we will see each other again. Please forgive me for not being stronger or trusting better: I'm working on it. And never give up, never despair, even if it all takes time. The best things always do.

All my love, unto ages of ages,
Hosea

I have no idea how she'll take this. But I do think I have to remember how mercurial my own emotions can be, and to factor that in as part of understanding our relationship together. Too often I think I present myself here as the consummate detached observer. But maybe it isn't quite so.

Point of clarification

I got a private e-mail earlier today from a reader who suggested that maybe I haven't been very clear with D about what I see in the future. For a long time that was true, though I think that I have cleared some of that up recently. But the things that I write to her don't always end up here (and vice versa) so I thought it might be useful to let you know what I have told her about what I see in my future:

• Once I divorce Wife, I do not expect to marry again. Anyone.
• Nor do I expect to live with anyone else in an all-but-the-ceremony equivalent of marriage.
• But I do expect that I will want to continue to see her -- this means in intervals, visits -- on indefinitely into the future.
• What I have not told her: These visits can't be very long at a stretch. Last summer we had our eleventh date, where we were together for an uninterrupted week and a half, and it was too long. Her sheer, non-stop energy and intensity had worn me out by the end of it.

As for the marriage:

• I plan to start dissolving the marriage after Son 2 enters high school. That should be in about two years. My reason for waiting is that Son 2 will probably be in boarding school like Son 1 (possibly not the same school), and so both boys will be out of the house by then. I know the boys have a strong sentimental attachment to the house and the neighborhood, which is why I want to wait till they are already in a new environment.
• The discovery of that e-mail from Friend caused me to re-evaluate seriously whether I should accelerate this process. But a little reflection persuaded me that divorce can't stop e-mail.
• Also, the consensus seems to be that in this state courts almost always split custody pretty close to 50-50. My lawyer is willing to take whatever approach I want, but even she admitted in an unguarded moment that 50-50 custody is pretty much the norm. So I doubt I would be able to prevent whatever influences they are going to pick up from Wife anyway. Both boys seem to have developed pretty good compartmentalization skills.
• So I think that leaves me back with the "two years from now" plan.

I think those are the highlights of my thinking, in a nutshell. I may not have spelled out all the implications of that second set of bullets, but I know I have gone over them at a high level. D knows about my Two-Year Plan, for instance.

Just as a point of clarity ....

Looking back and looking forward

I mentioned a week ago that D and I had started snipping at each other over the question when and how to schedule our next visit. From there the conversation got more difficult, as we focussed on the question how to pay for it. I was going to include selections from the e-mails back and forth as they got progressively more heated, all as a follow-on to this post about money. But somehow time got away from me. I would like to tell you that I was the soul of reason in all this, and she was the one who was being flagrantly irrational. Maybe I still will. But. less tendentiously, I should say that I insisted (still stinging from her remarks here about fearing I am a cheapskate) that I would not accept any arrangement except that I pay for everything. She seemed to feel that this made her a "bought woman" somehow, and insisted that she would not accept anything except a rigid accounting of what was hers and mine, down to the penny. Obviously this conversation was going nowhere.

As this discussion was chugging along going nowhere, I got Janeway's feedback on this post, and it set me thinking. Janeway pointed out that, after all, I am attracted to high-maintenance women in the first place, so what am I complaining about? What should I expect? And if "high-maintenance" is what I am looking for, then why the hell am I not "maintaining"? If I know that D panics easily, why am I not doing everything in my power to reassure her, and chalking it up to the cost of the relationship?

As I say, I started thinkng about this. Am I attracted to high-maintenance women? That certainly seems to be my track record. On the other hand, bending over backwards to calm, stroke, reassure, and "maintain" while chalking all that up to the cost of the relationship is what I've done for a quarter century with Wife. It's getting old.

The thing is that I am attracted to these women, but that doesn't mean I actually enjoy them in the long term very well. In other words, my dick is excited by them (and my hormones, pheromones, etc) but the rest of me finds them tiring after a while. In other words, my dick has no goddamned sense. I suppose I am not the first man on earth to make that complaint. But this means that the real question in all this -- the real question -- is whether I want to continue the affair with D at all. Is it worth the headaches? The details about "When is our next trip?" or "Who picks up the tab?" are only secondary.

So I spent a couple of days thinking about that, and not replying much to D. She read my silence, and got ever more irritated and demanding on the subject. Finally tonight (Saturday) I went for a long walk after dinner to figure out what I wanted to say. When I came back and sat down at the keyboard, I still didn't know if I was going to say Stay or Go. But I just started typing. What came out ended up more conciliatory (or perhaps just more spineless) than I had expected it would be. I'm not at all sure it was the right decision, or the right thing to say. But here is what I wrote:

Dearest D,

Sometimes it is hard for me to remember just how lonely you are, and just how much pain that causes you. I'm sorry. But I have been thinking about it a lot the last couple of days, and I think that your loneliness must cause you a kind of chronic pain that cuts every bit as deeply, and hurts every bit as cruelly, as the pain Wife feels from any of her illnesses. In some ways it is easy to forget that you bear such a burden, because the surface differences are so great. But it must ache evilly all the same.

At the same time, I have also come to understand over the last several months that I can't cure it, or at any rate not alone. I can offer relief in bursts, in interludes; but that's not the same as a long-term cure. And for all your overly kind words, I'm not a god. I'm not even Aesculapius. (wan smile) I'm just a guy, ... with too much education and not enough sense. If there is a man in the world who can chase away your loneliness all by himself, he is a stronger and fuller and better man than I am. He's not me. Of course we all need more than a single other person in our lives. We all need a full community, and that's often hard to come by. Paradoxically there are far more people around than during the Stone Age, and yet we are each of us close to fewer people than we would have been then. Or so I guess.

That's not to sell short how wonderful our visits are when they happen. The reading to each other, the theater, the long walks, the even longer talks ... it's all the stuff of blissful memories. And of course the love-making is always divine.

But our love has also been very difficult, and I think that's been true for both of us. You are still banging your head against a wall trying to deal with the same weaknesses of mine that caused you such headaches two years ago, and they still frustrate you just as much. For my part, I find that even though our conversations are wonderful, there are ever more topics that are off-limits, because (as in our recent discussion of home-ownership) I say "white" and you hear "black" and I have learned over the long years that impasses like that don't go away no matter how many times you try ... so I just change the subject and talk about something else. I think you have had just as much trouble with my failing to understand you sometimes. In short, one way or another we are still playing out the very same fights we fought two years ago. I know that pattern, and it disturbs me.

The upshot is that it has been fairly difficult for me to focus on the narrow question of how we pay for our visits or when we schedule them, because my mind keeps sliding back to the big picture. It's not that I can't make up a cover story and pay my own airfare -- if you remember our visit just a year ago, in November of 2009, that's exactly what I did then. (If you pause a minute, you'll recall that I didn't go to the office because in fact -- except for a couple of meals and a trip to the movies to see "Precious" -- we never got out of bed.) I can do all that. But it's not easy for me (the story, I mean, not the money). It takes some deliberation. And when we have been fighting like we have recently, it is hard to get motivated.

So what's the bottom line? In the short run, I don't expect to stay mad. I never do. And our visits are always splendid. So I'm sure that in a little while I'll be able to look forward more eagerly than I can right now. If you still have any desire to see me after this, and if you haven't found someone better in the meantime, it might be helpful if you could send me your holiday calendar covering the time between now and the end of the school year. Having that information in advance would make it easier for me to plan around the times that you will actually be free.... We still have not settled the question how to pay for these trips, and I have to confess I don't much like either of the plans you have proposed. But I think it is better if we forget it now and figure it out later. I am a strong believer in dropping questions when the parties cannot agree, because in a few weeks they might forget what the disagreement was about in the first place and be able to start over more cheerfully and more creatively. That sounds dumb until you try it, but you'd be surprised how often it results in an agreement that both parties are well-pleased with.

I do love you, D. For both our sakes, I wish that made things a lot easier than it does. But it's still true, all the same.

Hosea

I guess in the morning I'll find out what she says in return.

Headache

I woke up with a headache this morning, but I think I have diagnosed the cause. I'm pretty sure it was all the fault of that third glass of brandy last night, after dinner. I assume naturally that the bottle of cider and half bottle of wine with dinner were blameless, as well as the first two glasses of brandy afterwards. But I had a pretty good notion even as I was pouring the third one that it was probably a bad idea.

Not that I have ever been dissuaded from doing something merely because I could tell it was a bad idea, obviously.

Proving my love?

The conversations with D have been deteriorating. A few hours after she sent me the one I quoted in my earlier post -- before I had had a chance to reply -- she sent a follow-on note that was still light and elegant:

Dearest Hosea,

Home--at last, and I'll say a rueful good night to you. I have had time, through all my classes, to think about not seeing you for many weeks or months and it is hard to be very cheerful. Part of me just wants to step back and leave you alone for a while; I know I can't change a great deal, because the hold-up isn't really on my end. But that seems dreary and ever so undesirable, so I only very reluctantly consider that possibility. I thought you might call...no, you didn't. And you haven't and won't for a while. And I'm not 'allowed' to call you. I can get pretty depressed about this situation without trying very hard.

So what's really going on in my head? I guess there are two worries that need to be put on the table. One is my concern that for a myriad of reasons, you prefer to live with Wife and can see no clear way to another sort of life or love apart from her for a long time. This whole issue is truly complex; she is ill, needs your help. Wife is the children's mother and you want to preserve the family unit. You dislike change and the prospect of upheaval, both emotional and physical. I'm not the person you hoped for and it's easier to stay with Wife than to have to tell me the truth. And on, and so forth...lots of insecurity, doubts, and all kinds of unattractive demons at play.

The second concern is financial. I have been told for years by Wife that you are cheap, and that you refuse to spend money on much outside the children's needs. Occasionally, I've run into that reluctance. To see me without your work paying for much of our expenses changes the equation. There are dozens of reasons why seeing me is financially imprudent and unwise. I understand that and yet...those reasons cannot help but make me feel insecure. You did not want to discuss money matters and I agreed because I had little choice, but they won't go away. So now what?

I miss you. I could talk about my classes, my colleagues, my students. I could discuss your gnostic beliefs and ask whether you really want to embrace that philosophical option even though you deny doing so. I could ask you about the election results or follow your work schedule. But instead I listen to Mozart's Requiem again and again; I take it out of my little home stereo and play it on the way to school, unable to let go of its affirmation of life. I pray that my desire for you will be granted and you will not walk away. I can always hope....

I do love you, passionately, and always, in all that I do and all that I am.

D

It sounds lovely. And yet, ... is it just me? Somehow when I read this it all looks like window-dressing designed to soften and prettify a core message which reads, As long as we haven't scheduled another visit sometime soon, I have to believe that "you prefer to live with Wife" and it's not worth it to you to see me unless it's free -- i.e., "without your work paying for much of our expenses." In other words, you don't love me. Because if you really loved me, you'd already have made arrangements to see me again by by now. So there!

I don't know, probably I'm over-reading here. But I can't get over the feeling that this sounds like some teenaged boy back in the Fifties telling his girlfriend, "Betty, you say you love me, but you've got to prove it!" When what he means is he wants her to put out. (Obviously the last thing I need to fear from D is a reluctance to put out, but it's an analogy.)

Anyway, the result is that I am feeling a little ... I don't know, ... irritable. Do I want to see her? Of course. Am I perishing from her absence like I would from an absence of oxygen ... seemingly like she is perishing from mine? No, not really. I'm fine with spending my own money to go see her, although at this point I'll be damned if I'm going to let her buy her own ticket; if we are going to meet in some third location, I'll buy both of them or we won't go. And that means I have to be a little cautious where I pick, because the cost of two tickets can add up. And I also resent the emotional manipulation: obviously you must love Wife more than you love me, or you'd have already made plans; obviously you're a cheapskate because you haven't already bought your tickets. No other explanation is possible.

Of course, in a conversation like this, explanation is useless. I've already talked through all these issues with her; that she has circled back to the same tired old insecurities means that she doesn't believe me. All that talk is just talk. OK, that's a fair opinion to hold. But if that's her opinion, the only way I'll ever change her mind is by deeds. So I may as well just shut the fuck up until I either (a) figure out a good place/time for us to meet and buy both our tickets, or else (b) tell her it ain't gonna happen any time soon and have done.

I didn't quite put it that way, but this is how I wrote back:

Dearest D,

Freedom? Wow. I certainly hadn't thought about any of this with respect to that kind of context. That is a pretty monumental re-framing of the discussion. I may have to think about that for a bit. [Of course I was thinking about some of the thoughts I had here.]

You don't say it in so many words, but when I read your letter this morning I was sure I felt a subtext which ran more or less, "Don't bother writing back until you have booked a ticket or have clearly decided to tell me No." I hope that's not what you have in mind, because I haven't bought a ticket yet. I explained to Wife over dinner tonight that I have been thinking about taking a vacation somewhere, like she just did by going to visit her sister ... somewhere that could be just a vacation without my having to go to the office while I was there. She asked, "Where?" and I told her quite honestly that I hadn't figured that out yet. She suggested Greece.

[There followed two paragraphs about work that I’ll skip.]

In other news, Son 2 has set himself to learning Tom Lehrer's song, "The Elements." That would make him only the second person I know personally -- besides myself, I mean -- who has memorized the whole thing. At present he is somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 the way there, but he has only been working on it a couple of days.

Meanwhile I should go back to consulting a map. I hope you didn't stop reading at the point where I said I hadn't bought a ticket yet. Of course I will let you know right away when I do.


You have all my love, reading or not, now and ever,
Hosea

As you know by now, that's really terse by my standards, and she replied in kind. Attentive readers will also notice that her salutation changes from "Dearest" to "Dear": she does that whenever she is pissed at me.

Dear Hosea,

I didn't mean to imply that you should stop writing until you bought a ticket, but I do think the end of your business trips (at least for the foreseeable future) means you will have to decide whether it is worth seeing me when you have to spend the time and money to do so. I have no idea what your decision will be.

Songs about the elements? Okay....not sure how to respond. I should go and write vocabulary quizzes.

Take care, be well.

All my love, or friendship, or whatever seems possible. There's a great deal of both, and the cost should be supportable for both of us.
D

And so we stagger and sputter our way down to tonight.

Dear D,

The more I think about it, the more I think I really can't write anything serious or substantive (or call) until the travel question is definitively settled one way or another. Here's how I see it: this question -- for all the reasons that you have so gently and sensitively spelled out -- is really the foremost one that we have to discuss right now. I think it will get in the way of trying to talk about anything else. What's more, it's not really something that can be answered in words, can it? I mean, the whole question is whether all these words that I have lavished on you over the years really count for anything; so the only possible way to back them up is with deeds, not just more words.

So I have to beg you to excuse the absence of a longer letter, just for the moment. I'm confident that soon our correspondence will resume its normal volume and frequency.

I really would like to know the dates of your Christmas break, however. I'm trying to compare a couple of ideas.
All my love, Hosea

And finally, ...

Dearest Hosea,

Thank you for writing. I'm not happy about not hearing from you; I sometimes think that we often mis-cue on these issues; I don't always understand your family responsibilities and commitments, and you don't always understand how alone I am. It's not easy. I realize you don't mean to punish me, but it feels like that. Or just more silence and loneliness. That said, I'm not depressed and I've been quite productive.

My vacation begins on the xx of December, ends on xx of January, although I can easily make that the next day by missing the faculty meeting.

Please tell me what you are thinking, and reconsider establishing phone communication.

All my love, ever and always,
D

Some glimmer in that last one -- we're back to "Dearest," for starters. But it's hard for me to put aside being grumpy. That reference to my "family responsibilities" grates. She is always invoking my "family responsibilities" to explain things that are totally unrelated to them. In this case those "responsibilities" have nothing to do with why I am not writing. I'm not writing because I feel cornered, because I am torn between my longing for a grand geste that will make her put aside these nagging insecurities once for all, and my resentment at feeling shoved into such a position in the first place.

Probably I really am being pusillanimous and cheap and frightened of change. But I know she's got one thing wrong, at least. That part about how kind and caring I am towards Wife, ... that at least I can disprove. I'm far more callous than that these days.

Good to know, huh?