Escape to Fantasyland?

We have bad news from Boyfriend 4: he has colon cancer and tumors on his liver. Doctors have discussed a couple of (unpleasant) treatment options with him, but nobody will give hm an actual prognosis. They'd rather send him to another specialist instead.

A couple of years ago, Wife wanted to ditch me and marry Boyfriend 4; now she tells him she's concerned about him, and she'll go so far as to tell me she is "sure" he'll lose his medical insurance and won't be eligible for any kind of public support (an impressive bit of "awfullizing" insofar as she can't quote any actual facts to back up her nightmare vision), ... but then she goes running off to Boyfriend 5 to weep on his shoulder.

Boyfriend 5? Excuse me? She's never even met Boyfriend 5 in real life. And what does it say about all her protestations to Boyfriend 4 about her eternal love, that now she wants to escape his bad news by running away to another country to be comforted by somebody she doesn't know? It's the kind of reaction that makes me hope I never get terminally ill and need to rely on her for something, lest she run off to Kazakhstan or some place to get away from the demands ....

The thing is that Boyfriend 4, during the two years that she was regularly fucking him, hung around our place a lot. He helped the boys with their homework; he'd pitch in with dinner; in many ways he became a kind of extended family member. This set him apart from Wife's other boyfriends, most of whom wanted as little as possible to do wih her domestic life because it interfered with getting her in bed.

So let me ask you: when you hear that a family member has a terminal illness, how many of you run to seek comfort from romantic strangers? And what would you say about someone who did?

I understand being shaken up. I understand needing a shoulder to cry on. But I would have thought that the shoulder would belong to someone in the family. When misfortune strikes that close to home, I would have guessed that comfort would have to come from home too. The fact that Wife wouldn't even consider crying on my shoulder but wants to go spend all her time with Boyfriend 5 -- in his own country, even, thousands of miles from home -- strikes me as funny, somehow.

No, ... you know, "funny" isn't the right word. The right word is "cowardly". I mean, picture it to yourself. Suppose you saw a teenage girl whose beloved grandmother took deathly ill, so she suddenly threw herself frantically into dating some guy that just joined her math class a week before. On the surface that would look callous and uncaring. But you wouldn't have to look too hard to see that this girl was scared to death -- no pun intended -- and that her frenetic dating was a way of sticking her fingers in her ears and singing "La-la-la, I can't hear you!"

What is strange is that this isn't Wife's first brush with death. Both her parents are dead. Two of her brothers are dead. She has nursed the sick and the dying before. So why does she have such a problem this time, facing illness straight in the face? Why does she have to go bury her head in a fantasy?

I suppose one answer is that she was already totally infatuated with Boyfriend 5 before we got the news about Boyfriend 4, and now gosh ... what's a girl to do? Turn her back on a new lover (even if he -- or they -- is/are totally hypothetical) just because some old lover is having a bad day? God forbid! That might be rude, or violate the rapt attention she owes the new guy -- not to mention that it could actually interfere with her having a good time! Of course, it does make you wonder what all those former promises of eternal love meant, or what they were worth. There is also the lingering question what she might owe somebody that she loved only a year ago. But hell, that was then and this is now. Right?

Maybe that's too cynical of me. But I guess I am a little sensitive to the whole question of how Wife treats the people she used to be in love with, if only because she has had so many affairs since the day she married me.

I should ask what she thinks is going on. I should ask whether she sees anything cheap or slutty about seeking comfort in the [virtual] arms of somebody brand-new, when a man she could have married two years ago suddenly turns up sick. I should ask if she is able to summon up even the slightest shard of respect for the woman she sees in the mirror every morning.

I should ask, but I'll probably chicken out.

Wounded puppies

I got a little more insight today into what attracts Wife to Boyfriend 5 (in this case I mean the middle one, the one about our age). He is a wounded puppy, and she is just the kind of girl who drags home wounded puppies and pleads "Look, his paw is hurt! Can we keep him while I nurse him back to health? Can we, huh, can we?"

More exactly: Boyfriend 5 is weak, sensitive, and incredibly emotional. He lives with his father, who loves his son but has no use for weakness. And every single day he [the son] bends Wife's ear for hours about some trivial problem that has gotten him totally overwrought.

Wife just eats this up. She coos, she coddles, she consoles -- so far as she is able, from thousands of miles away. She has to be extra careful how she says things, for fear he'll take an innocent remark the wrong way and plunge off the deep end into hurt or despair. She gets to be a lover to him by whispering sweet nothings as encouragement; a mother by holding him to her bosom and telling him she believes in him; and a priest by giving him sober counsel on how to find the right road out of the tempest in a teapot that he has brewed for himself. [Of course I mean these physical images figuratively, since all their communication is over the Internet.] Then his aged father will log on, complaining that his son has once again gotten himself worked up over a triviality, and Wife gets to play the priest and/or the spouse once again, smoothing Father's feathers, telling him the right way to handle his son, and commiserating with him about how the kid seems to make things so hard for himself.

And I think this is part of what attracts her to Boyfriend 5 ... exactly that he is so incredibly high-maintenance. In fairness I also suspect that if she had to live with him for a month or six the charm would rapidly wear off. I think she would start being profoundly frustrated that Boyfriend 5 is so chronically needy. I think the only thing that makes this situation livable for her is precisely that he is not closer by, and that the relationship is new and probably not permanent. (Don't say that last part to Wife's face, however; she still seems to think this romance will outlast the moon and the stars.)

It sounds odd to say that Boyfriend 5's weaknesses and emotional pathologies are the things that attract Wife, but in fact it is not such a strange concept. Peter D. Kramer, in his book Against Depression, writes of the erotic charm that depressives (often women) hold for non-depressives (often men). He instances Marlene Dietrich's characters in The Blue Angel or Stage Fright. And he writes of numerous patients who have confirmed that this attraction is not uncommon -- non-depressives who find themselves helplessly in love with depressives (even against their wills), or depressives who find themselves chased by non-depressives.

What is more, truly, I think those same features -- pretty exactly -- are part of why I myself stay with Wife. Oh, it is surely more complex than that; there are any number of reasons that all build on each other to account for why I am too damned stubborn to leave, no matter how badly my feelings get hurt this day or that one. But it is clear to me that part of what makes her still attractive to me, in spite of everything, is her depression. I can't explain it rationally, but love is not a rational thing.

On the other hand, I sure wish I understood better what this means and where it leaves us.

Baby steps?

Wife was really tired tonight, but I tried to talk with her briefly. She told me that Boyfriend 5 wanted to know something from me, and I suggested that he should just send me an e-mail. When she was quiet, I asked if there was some kind of problem with this solution.

Wife: No, except that you might ask him to stop all communication with me.

Me: Really? What would that get me? I mean, what do you think the result would be?

Wife: I don't know.

Me: You don't know? If I asked Boyfriend 5 never to communicate with you again, would he do it?

Wife: I don't know. He might genuinely think it was the best thing for me.

Me: That's a little hard for me to believe. If I asked you never to communicate with Boyfriend 5 again, would you do it?

Wife: [almost inaudibly] No.

Me: OK, that I believe. By the way, if I asked you never to communicate with Boyfriend 5 again, and if you decided to ignore me and keep communicating with him anyway, would you tell me you were doing so?

Wife: [silence]

Me: Come on, in a case like that -- which is purely hypothetical -- would you have the backbone to tell me that you had decided to ignore me and were still communicating with him?

Wife: [almost inaudibly] Yes.

Me: Well, compared to ten years ago, I guess that's progress. You and I both know that ten years ago you wouldn't have told me something like that if you thought I would be unhappy. [I was thinking of Boyfriend 2.] Do you think that ten years from now we might be able to talk about your boyfriends openly, without each of us being afraid of how the other will react?

Wife: Maybe, yeah.

Sex and self-esteem

A couple of days ago I wrote about my confusion over what Wife wants from her multiple affairs, and I speculated that maybe even she doesn't know what she wants. I mean, she claims to consider it just a normal part of who she is at this point: ever since I first found an article about polyamory and brought it home, she has claimed the term as a ... well, I almost want to say "badge of honor" but I suppose I have to add that it only counts as that in a very select group.

But part of what makes this so confusing is that there seems to be a part of Wife's mind that is repelled by her own sexuality. She can't even be a pure polyamorist, because she is in some ways so conflicted about sex.

So at this point I have to wonder: What must it feel like inside: ...

• if (on the one hand) you have had multiple lovers and expect to have more in the future, and if you consider this plenitude not to be some kind of bizarre biographical accident but rather to be a fundamental part of Who You Are;
• and yet if (on the other hand) you are also profoundly embarrassed by your own sexual desires, so that you can't talk about them and and hate to admit to them in front of anybody whose esteem matters to you ... i.e., anybody whom you think at all well of?

I guess that this would be a very tough spot to be in. But I suppose, at a theoretical level, that there would be at least two consequences.

• If you feel embarrased by sex and yet feel driven to have a lot of it with different partners, I think that would have to mean that you feel embarrassed by Being You. Another way to say this is that I suppose you would have to feel a chronic, gnawing insecurity about Who You Are -- a deep-seated belief that the Real You is somehow never good enough.
• If you feel embarrased by sex then you won't want to admit to strong sexual needs in front of anybody you think well of ... because it will matter to you that those people respect you, and you will assume that there is no way they could respect you if they only knew what dark desires lurk under your surface persona. But obviously you have to admit to sexual needs to the people whom you actually fuck. Therefore, logically, you are left with no choice but to fuck people whom you do not admire or respect.

All this is hypothetical. But it is interesting to note that both conclusions seem to be true about Wife. On the one hand, she has a pathetically weak sense of self-esteem. And on the other hand, she only falls in love with losers or weaklings.

Let's start with self-esteem.

I am not the first person to note a correlation between poor self-esteem and infidelity. I didn't even come up with the idea independently -- I read it somewhere. (I forget where I first saw it, but you can find a reference by following this link.) All I have done is to try to analyze this idea in the case of Wife, in particular, to see if it fits. Ironically, nobody who has just met Wife for the first time would ever guess that she has low self-esteem, because she usually comes across as so condescending and arrogant. But I have come to believe that this seeming arrogance is meant merely as a defense against feelings of inferiority. Two examples:

• Wife believes firmly that she is ugly. There's no point trying to argue this with facts; she has had "body issues" for something like the last four decades, and she runs down her own appearance routinely as if it were some basic requirement of polite conversation. Nor does this appear to be part of some strategy to elicit compliments from others. The other morning she was sitting on our bed wearing nothing but a skimpy nightie, and I told her how genuinely attractive I find her ... still, after all the years we have been married. Her response was to curl up in a ball in fetal position and beg me to stop saying it.
• Wife is always comparing other people's intelligence (unfavorably) with her own, but she is gnawingly disappointed in her own achievement. She got a perfectly respectable B.A. from a fine undergraduate college, but she never finished graduate school. To this day, she alternately claims degrees she was never awarded and insists that I must look down on her for not completing a professional degree. (Since she has more years of graduate school than I do, I really don't think I treat her in a way that would justify this belief to the average person.)

For what it is worth, the cripplingly low self-esteem seems to be something she shares with both sisters, and with her mother. Naturally I don't know their complete sexual histories, so I can't tell if the correlation between low self-esteem and high infidelity holds true for all three. But one sister is on her fifth husband; the other was on her third several years ago, when we lost track of her. Wife's mother always claimed to have had three husbands, except that a few years ago she told us there was a fourth -- before any of the others -- with whom she eloped to Mexico so there was no legal record. Oh, and this fourth fellow was the real father of her first child, who had always been called the child of her first [acknowledged] husband. And did I mention that neither Wife nor her younger sister look anything like any of her mother's husbands, but they both look a lot like a good friend who hung around the house for many years? Or that she met each husband in sequence while still married to the previous one? These facts could all be isolated coincidences; certainly they prove nothing in a logical or even legal sense. But they are interesting.

What about falling in love with losers and weaklings?

Well, let's work our way backwards from the present.

• Boyfriend 5 is a terrorist (or rather a family of terrorists). Are they successful? They have to hide indoors whenever a police patrol cruises through town. The only jobs they can hold are doing administrative work for their organization. One of the three of them is a drug addict. I'm not sure there's a lot more I need to add.
• Boyfriend 4 is a chronically unemployed alcoholic. Nice guy, though.
• Boyfriend 3 was already on his third marriage (and probably his hundredth affair) when he frst met Wife. Neither of his two former wives will speak to him any more, and he is estranged from the children they bore him. His current children don't respect him and have trouble staying disciplined in school.
• Boyfriend 2 has never held a regular job in his life. The woman who bore his child lives in another city, and the child will grudgingly speak to her father by phone once a year -- on Father's Day.
• Girlfriend 1 was probably the only one of the lot worth more than the powder to blow her to Hell -- she was smart, organized, and ambitious -- and she was the one (ultimately) to abandon Wife. When Wife has tried to contact her since then via e-mail, Girlfriend 1 has never responded. But at the time they first became involved, Girlfriend 1 was only 18 and Wife was an adult and a professional; so there was still a clear power differential.
• Boyfriend 1? Gosh, that's reaching way back. He had a job and he wasn't chemically dependent, so that means he wasn't quite as bad a loser as any of Wife's other boyfriends since. But he was chronically irresolute: simple decisions between vanilla and chocolate were major life crises for him. His irresolution also seemed to manifest itself (from what I was told second-hand) in a disconcerting tendency to lose his erections in bed, with no ejaculation and no other warning. Wife complained to me more than once that one of the frustrating things about fucking Boyfriend 1 was the risk of "having the car engine die in the middle of an intersection."

On the whole, I guess I find it remarkable that the results are so consistent. As near as I can tell, every single one of Wife's affairs in the last decade (and almost every affair since our marriage) has been with a weakling or a loser. Of course, maybe there have been others I don't know about.

When I first noticed this pattern, my thought was that Wife was trying to cope with her own feelings of inferiority by surrounding herself with people, as Monty Python once put it, "whom almost anyone can look down on." But that didn't explain the sex. I guess nobody wants to have sex with the Village Idiot. I am more satisfied with the idea I propose above: that it is only to such people that Wife can dare to admit her own sexual cravings, because it's not like they have any grounds to give themselves airs or think they are better than she is.

And if that is true, it is really, really sad. I wish I knew an easy cure, and that Wife had any interest in being cured.

Sex and the desperate housewife

I got home from my business trip, and Wife and I spent a little time talking about her new affaire de coeur - cum - Internet infatuation with Boyfriend 5. Not really a lot of time, considering all that has been going on.

One of the things we have not discussed yet is the sexual side of this infatuation, and of others like it. Of course in a sense there isn't any sexual side, because Boyfriend 5 lives in another country. That doesn't stop Wife from fantasizing about him (them) though, so in her mind there is certainly a hope for some kind of future along these lines.

What's to discuss? I don't know ... maybe questions like what she hopes to get out of ever-newer romances that she can't get from the older ones (or even from me)? Or more generally, what does she want out of a sexual relationship to begin with? That could, for example, help me understand why she regularly chases after new ones.

The thing is, I'm not sure she knows. Or more precisely, I don't think she can allow herself to know, because I think that at some deep level she is profoundly conflicted about sexual relationships as such. On the one hand, she has traditionally had a very strong sex drive. (Lately this has been dampened somewhat by illness and other things, but I am speaking over the long haul of decades here.) On the other hand, there seems to be a part of her that finds sex -- as such -- shameful or degrading. She would be reluctant to admit this, for reasons that I might almost call "political" -- namely, that as a feminist and as a woman who does not subscribe to very "traditional" social norms, she professes a belief that sex and the body are natural and that there is nothing to be ashamed of in nature. But try talking to her about it and she blushes and changes the subject. It is not an easy thing for her to talk about.

Now, in fairness I should admit that I too often find it kind of difficult to talk clearly about sex, at any rate when it involves me. But the upshot is that this is not an area where we have ever been able to communicate at all well. And I think this is part of the frustration that Wife feels in our marriage ... and that she hopes to be able to cure magically with somebody else. Since the communication problem is on her side as well as mine, though, changing partners doesn't always seem to be quite the panacea she hopes for.

An example or two might be in order. (Anybody who is going to be offended by examples that could get a bit graphic should just stop reading here ... you've already got the main point up above.)

When Wife and I were first married, her response to foreplay was to lie as still and motionless as possible ... apparently because she was embarrassed to admit when she enjoyed it. But this meant that I had no idea what she liked and what she didn't, or even if she was responding at all; sometimes after an extended time with no response whatsoever I would simply give up. It wasn't until years later that, in the middle of a tirade on some other topic, she accused me of torturing her in order to control her ... where "torture" meant getting her thoroughly aroused and then quitting before she could orgasm. Huh? She was aroused back then, when she lay silent and stiff as a board? Who knew?

She has -- very belatedly -- gotten better about showing it when she is aroused, but the mixed signals still continue. A week or two ago, just before my last business trip, I awoke one morning as she took my hand and placed it directly onto her open vulva, which was already sopping wet. I took this as an invitation to massage the area and proceeded to do so, with perhaps some special attention to her clitoris. Later that day she complained bitterly that I had "hit on" her so crudely, and that I had apparently "never even heard of foreplay."

She is embarrassed whenever I see her orgasm; she is deeply humiliated if I happen to catch sight of her masturbating. And yet, what kind of sex life is it when you can't orgasm in front of your partner? How can you be open and relaxed with somebody -- and this is a prerequisite for good sex -- if you can't ever allow that person to see you stimulate yourself, even though everyone knows that everyone else does so from time to time? How can that possibly be satisfying?

Things start out better when she is first with someone else, but they don't stay that way. At the beginning of a new affair, her libido is in overdrive and new lovers naturally assume that this quantity of uninhibited sex is what they should expect in the future. But the quantity and frequency of sex that she is willing to offer never stay at that level. I specifically remember once when Wife complained to me about a time that Boyfriend 1 approached her profoundly aroused -- I think her phrase was "hard as a rock" -- and more or less pleaded for sexual attention from her; her response was to shove past him to get out of bed and go about her business. Ironically a few years later she told me an almost identical story about Girlfriend 1. Then there was the time she was with Boyfriend 2 and dropped her pants as an apparent invitation -- only to keep chattering to him incessantly about the day-to-day anxieties on her mind until he was totally unable to respond. Or the time that she unilaterally told Boyfriend 4 that she was no longer interested in fucking him, so the terms of their relationship would simply have to change. Like that.

And it is possible that I have just answered my own question. Maybe the thing that is so special about new romances and new lovers is that she lets herself fuck more freely then. After all, a new romance is dominated by flirting, coyness, come-hither smiles followed by quick glances away, ... all of that stuff. When the new lovers finally do lie down together, it is like the [forgive me] climax of a novel or a movie; there is so much narrative force [so to speak] behind the event that I don't think Wife gives herself a chance to feel embarrassed. Certainly the first time Wife and I fell into bed together she wasn't shy about her orgasms ... nor really about much else, come to think of it. She only seemed to get more prudish as we got to know each other better, and as our sex became more frequent and more normal.

Of course if this hypothesis is true, then I can't expect any end to the new lovers -- to the infidelities -- until the day that Wife no longer wants sex with anybody; because if this hypothesis is true, the only satisfactory sex that Wife can ever have is with people who are new. For both her sake and my own, I hope I am completely off base. But this theory does seem to explain some of the data.

I really don't know.

If you want to know, ... ask

This will be short.

I telephoned Wife. She was mad because I had sent an e-mail to Boyfriend 4, during which I had mentioned that she was in love with Boyfriend 5: how dare I? Ummm, ... sorry, I had no idea this was a secret. I mean, it's not like I told the in-laws, or her friends from church. But is Boyfriend 4 off-limits? At least he's not going to be shocked at her falling in love with somebody outside of marriage!

Well no, she just wanted to be able to tell him in her own way.

OK, I apologized a few more times because there is something I wanted to know from her, and I knew she would never answer the question while still mad at me: what would it take for her to be comfortable discussing her romantic life with me? Let's set an idealized goal of perfect communication:

• where she would feel free to say "I've been getting to know this guy and I really like him and I think I might be falling in love" without my having to ask (and without waiting till it is a done deal);
• where, for that matter, she would feel free to say "I hope you had a nice day at work; I went over to So-and-so's house and he fucked my brains out all day until I went to get the kids from school -- would you believe I had three orgasms in one afternoon?" without fear that I would mope and sulk [I probably would anyway, but I'd like her not to be afraid of that and therefore censor herself];
• and where, on the flip side, I would feel equally free to say "I worry that handing your affection out so cheaply could make your depression worse, by undermining your hard-earned self-esteem" without her freaking neurotically over my disapproval and therefore shutting down any further communication on the subject.

So if that is the goal, how do we get there? More particularly, the way I put it to her was "What do I have to change so that you would feel free talking to me this way?"

She was very quiet. When I asked her if she understood what I wanted, she said yes. She even agreed that would be wonderful, if only we could get there ... if we could manage to talk about her romantic life without either of us being afraid of the consequences of what we might say. But she added that she had no idea of how to get there.

"Really?" I asked. When was the last time that I yelled about any of your lovers? That's easy, she answered: Boyfriend 2. Yes, I said, and that proves my point; because he was the one you lied about the most. And while I may not like what I hear the rest of the time -- no guy wants to hear how much better in bed the other fellow is -- the only thing that makes me angry is the deceit.

Well, she went on, but I might not like what I hear. True, I conceded, but I don't think the world revolves around me. If there's something I don't like, maybe I just have to deal with it. Of course, I'd be grateful if you would listen to me rather than ignore me; but regardless how you respond, it is better from my perspective if you can at least talk to me.

I think she wanted to prove that I didn't really mean that, so she gave me what was supposed to sound like an extreme example: suppose she said that she was in love with all three generations of Boyfriend 5? But this was hardly shocking ... hadn't she already said nearly the same thing a couple days ago? So I went her one better, based on ideas that I have already mulled over in earlier posts: I said fine, let's assume that you are in love with all of them; and also that the only thing keeping you out of their respective beds is the thousands of miles of geography separating you; and therefore that if you ever visit their country or they ever come here, there is no telling what might happen on the physical level. You might decide that the teenager was too much of a little boy, or the old man might not be able to get it up any more, but we won't rule anything out until the time comes. Great, so we have assumed this -- what now?

I really think she was expecting me to be outraged. That I replied so matter-of-factly left her quiet again. And finally, she said she'd think about how to answer my question "How do we get there from here?" So we'll see ....

Of course her chronic infidelities bug me; if they didn't, I wouldn't be writing this blog to try to figure them out. But lies and secrecy bug me more. If we can find a way to get totally past the lies and secrecy without her being afraid what I might think, then maybe we can finally get to the point where I can actually tell her what I think without shutting down all the communication again. We'll see.

Plans for the week?

The kids are out of town on a school trip. I am out of town on business. What are Wife's plans?

I wish I knew: partly for all the easy, base reasons (jealousy, prurience, all those vices that we're supposed to be able to overcome as adults), and partly because I wish she felt she had some reason to trust me with information like that.

Does she have any such reason? I don't know. I haven't yelled over any of her amours in a long time. The only times I get nasty about them are when she tries to hide what is going on. I don't know what it takes for her to trust me on a topic like this, but I wish I knew the criteria and could find some way to meet them.

Do I trust her when she tells me that her only plans involve watching movies and sewing a new dress? No, not really.

The last time she had a week to herself like this, she spent much of it in bed with Boyfriend 2. Last weekend she told me that she had broken up with Boyfriend 2 "for good" a few months ago. I have no idea whether she is in contact with Boyfriend 3. If she is, he would be in easy driving distance and a likely partner -- the emotional side of that affair was way more intense than most of her others, and she tells me he is really fantastic in bed. (This is just the kind of thing a husband wants to hear, ain't it? On the other hand, if it is true then yes, I would rather hear it. Lying is poisonous.) The flip side is that if Boyfriend 3's wife ever catches him with my Wife again, she'll cut off his balls with a kitchen knife. Boyfriend 4 is too far out of town these days to be a realistic possibility, and Wife continues to insist to me that they are now "just friends". In a way that's almost too bad. For all his faults, Boyfriend 4 was in many ways my favorite of the lot; and as long as he had her attention, she was less likely to wander off with one of the others.

Then there is Boyfriend 5, but he (or "they" -- see my previous post) is allegedly out of the country and unavailable.

But Wife hasn't been approaching this week as gloomy and depressed as I would expect if she were going to be all alone. Is that just residual giddiness from her new online affair with Boyfriend 5 (all of them)? Or does she have other plans that she is just keeping quiet?

Inquiring minds want to know. They just won't get a chance to find out, I expect ....

We're up to Boyfriend 5!

Wife has been corresponding with this fellow over e-mail for several months now, and has been acting in ever more distinctive (and familiar) ways: hurriedly logging out of the computer whenever I come home, telling our boys not to tell Daddy that she has been IM'ing for the whole day with the same guy, and so forth. And it's not like I can't tell that she has been distracted. So last Sunday I asked her "Are you in love with him?" Wife responded with one non sequitur after another, each a subtle way of changing the subject; and after each one I more or less replied, "Yes, but are you in love with him?" And of course the bottom line answer was, "Yes, giddily, head over heels."

Now, this case is different from the others in a number of ways. Most basically, Wife and Boyfriend 5 have never actually met in the flesh, so far as I know. This means that maybe I shouldn't bother to list him at all, grouping him instead with all of the non-physical crushes she has had over the years (or with those, like the lead tenor in the church choir a few years back, about whom I have questions but can't prove anything). But I am adding him to the list on the strength of her peculiar behavior around the computer, plus the fact that we have actually had The Conversation ("Are you in love with him?") and it ended in what has become the standard way (a slew of quasi-denials followed by "Yes, and I'm glad that you know because now I no longer have to hide about it.")

A second highly unusual feature of Boyfriend 5 is that he is actually (so she says) three different people: a father, a son, and the son's son. They all use the same e-mail and IM account, and Wife says she can tell them apart by the way they write. But she is giddy-in-love with all three of them. That, in fact, was one of the first ways she tried to deflect my question: "Well, I write to all three of them, so I suppose if you were to say I was in love with one you'd have to say I was in love with all three." (Of course this only invited me to ask, "Yes, and are you?" Apparently so.)

This three-generations-in-one could be kind of interesting, if you think about it, in case Wife and any of them actually ever meet in person. It's not like I think Wife would try to keep the whole thing platonic, after all. But which of the three would she take to bed: the old man? the one who's about our age? the teenager? Or would she even feel that she had to choose just one? If this ever happened, it could get seriously interesting on logistical grounds alone.

There are reasons that it might never happen, or at any rate that it might be significantly delayed. Basically, Boyfriend 5 (I'm going to keep using that name for all of them lumped together) lives in a different country, across an ocean. So it's not like any of them could just drop in for a quickie. On the plus side, this may keep Wife's pelvic life from getting a lot more complicated any time real soon. On the minus side, this keeps the relationship on the Internet; and Wife is way too trusting of strangers on the Internet. I have tried to point out that -- for all she knows -- these people could be shysters from Sheboygan rather than who they claim to be. Her response to this was to ask them "Are you really who you say you are?" and to get the answer "Yes." By her lights, that settles it. And gosh, I know it sure sets my mind at ease.

The last distinctive thing about this family is that -- again, according to what Wife tells me -- they are terrorists. No, wait, let's make that "politically-active freedom fighters". They live in a part of the world where ethnic hatreds go back for centuries ... I guess I could call it the Middle East without going too far wrong. And they are actively involved supporting one faction against all the others -- a faction that is small and out of power, I should add. Wife started her friendship with Boyfriend 5 by saying that their fight wasn't her fight, and by steering clear of politics. Then she started worrying about them getting blown up. By now, ... well, I said she was giddily in love, didn't I? She still claims to be apolitical on this particular conflict, but that means "so long as Boyfriend 5 and all their friends win." In a sense this puts a whole new spin on the slogan "The personal is political" ....

Not sure how much more I have to add at the moment. I was starting to wonder if I was just never going to have the time to keep up this blog, or if I was going to run out of news for it. I should never have worried on that score.