Needs

I asked Wife today what she thinks "love" is ... in other words, what she expects from a relationship where she and someone else love each other.

She came up with a number of creative ways to dodge the question, apparently because she thought that I was trying to play "gotcha" and trip her up on some admission. But I stayed deliberately far away from that.

After a while, she defined love as a situation where the joy of the other person makes her joyful, and the pain of the other person makes her feel pain. And then she herself asked a question that I had scrupulously avoided -- viz., so in that case how can she carry on a romance with somebody else and still claim to love me, when she knows it hurts me for her to do that?

As I say, I had made a point of not asking that. But she asked it, and she also supplied an answer: yes, it hurts me deeply to see how hurt you are when I take another lover. But I can't help it, because I have these needs that are so strong ....

And you know? I bet that's true. I bet she really is driven by deep, inchoate needs, and not by rational calculation.

Of course, another way to say the same thing is that I am starting to suspect that Wife is a romance addict, and to wonder whether an intervention is in order. But that is a topic for another day.