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.