Running scared

I spent some time talking with Wife over the weekend. She said at one point that she thought the bravest and wisest thing she could do right now would be to e-mail Boyfriend 5 saying "Never contact me again." I'm sure she expected me to jump all over this offer.

Of course I realize that if she did this, she would simply hate and resent me for it. She wouldn't be doing it because she actually believed -- let alone understood -- in what respect it was the better thing to do. It would just be "one more time" that she sacrificed "everything that mattered to her" for my sake. Now maybe I should have taken her up on it (see, e.g., my remarks in my previous post about the role of self-denial in monogamy); but I have seen plenty of the "Hosea is a cruel and ruthless tyrant" drama over the years and I am in no big hurry to see more of it any time soon.

So instead I proposed to her that I have no idea whether that would be the right thing to do, but that doing the right thing for the wrong reasons can lead to all sorts of trouble. And I further proposed that she really doesn't know what she wants ... at any rate, not down deep. Because she doesn't know herself.

She wasn't sure what to make of this. At first she disagreed, saying that she thought she knew herself pretty well. And she said she does know what she wants -- namely, that she doesn't want anybody involved in this drama to get hurt: not me, not our kids, not Boyfriend 5, not herself.

Great, I replied. That's like wanting an end to world hunger. More exactly, the situation we are in right now is a situation where it is impossible to avoid people getting hurt; so to say that you don't want that outcome after getting yourself into this situation is just to deny any personal responsibility. It is to consign yourself to the role of permanent victim. Better would be to figure out what you really, truly want at a fundamental level and then accept the consequences of getting there.

I admitted that this isn't an easy thing to do; and I told her I think it is all the harder in her case because she is in constant pain and running scared, and therefore can't focus her attention. I suggested that this is why she so often thinks I am criticizing her, even when I tell her outright I'm not; because she hurts so much and is so scared that anything sounds like an attack. And I also suggested that she is afraid of failing to meet her own standards, and therefore invests a huge amount of energy in lying to herself about her actions and motives. This requires a never-ending stream of self-talk, to reassure herself that everything she does is ustified and none of it is her fault. The consequences of this stream of self-talk are, first, that whenever she thinks she has been accused of something she has an entire speech ready to defend herself (into which she will launch at the drop of a hat); and, second, she never has a minute's peace and quiet in which she can actually look at herself in the mirror and see the truth of who she has become.

Her first reply was that of course she thought I was criticizing her, because any time I talk about our relationship she comes out sounding like "a shallow, selfish little shit." I answered that much of the time I am simply describing events that happened, and I suggested that if she hears an accusation in my voice it is because her own standards tell her than anybody who does this and this and this must be a shallow, selfish little shit. And so I repeated that I think in many ways she is more afraid of her own standards than she is of me, and that she merely pastes my face on the superego which is condemning her because her only other alternative is to claw her own face off.

She was very quiet for a long time when I said this. And when she finally spoke, it was in a tiny little voice. She said she thought she could see a lot of truth in what I was saying. She wasn't sure that she and I were thinking of the same examples, and I told her I wasn't going to give examples right now because I wasn't sure she was ready for them. But, I said, the next time you think I am criticizing you and I say I'm not -- that will be an example you can meditate on.