Balance of terror

Wife still thinks I'm threatening her. Boyfriend 5 is encouraging her in this delusion, and proposing all sorts of things she needs to do while I am away from the house to "protect" herself. I'm supposed to go out of town on business next week, and Boyfriend 5 thinks that would be a great time for Wife to make all sorts of preparations. Can I afford to blow off the trip and stay at home?

Wife promises me -- "word of honor" -- that she doesn't discuss me with Boyfriend 5. Then she does so for hours. I haven't exactly rubbed her nose in it, because she would want proof before admitting anything; and proof is something I really don't want to give her. But she knows she is lying. She tells him so. This isn't just some innocent miscommunication.

I think I have figured out the underlying dynamic behind our marriage. It has to do with the fact that we interpret basic things very differently. We especially interpret each other's behavior very differently from the way we interpret our own behavior. This makes for disaster.

It goes something like this.

1. One of us does something that hurts or scares the other one -- it hardly matters what.
2. The other one reacts with pain or with self-defense. Let's suppose it is pain.
3. The first one never had any idea that the first act upset the spouse, and therefore interprets the pain as an unprovoked attack. Response is some kind of self-defense.
4. The second one interprets the self-defense as a renewed attack -- not only was there an original attack way back in the beginning, but now there is this new one too! My spouse must really hate me or want to undermine and destroy me. This step therefore repeats step 2, but with greater intensity.
5. Repeat step 3, but with greater intensity.
6. And so on. For twenty-five years.

And all the while, each one thinks "My intentions are totally innocent, but that other person is a monster bent on destroying me!" This leads to the thought, "Why can't the other person see that my intentions are totally innocent? It must be because he/she is a malevolent beast who doesn't give a damn for me!" Sometimes there might even be the added thought, "I can see how my defenses might be frightening the other person ... but it would be foolish for me to drop them as long as he/she is threatening me so directly and so maliciously. Therefore I won't drop my defenses until he/she drops his/her offensive weapons. That's only fair, isn't it? When I am no longer in danger, then I can afford to put down my shield."

The sad part, though, is that my shield looks like an offensive weapon to her. And her shield looks like an offensive weapon to me.

Over the years, my shield has included tools such as a loud voice; a sullen, sarcastic repartee; and occasional physical intimidation (although never physical damage). And I have to add that the physical intimidation (never harm) is something I have not used in over five years. More importantly, I have never used any of these tools in any interaction with Wife whatsoever unless I felt myself to be under direct attack intended to destroy me!

Over the years, Wife's shield has included extremes of temper: cyclonic tantrums on the one hand, where she shouted, wept, snarled like a wild animal and trashed the room she was in; and catatonic withdrawal on the other, where she sat for hours without a word or even a shift of position. It has also included threats of divorce, of ruinous legal action, and of kidnapping the children. And it has included mountainous burdens of self-pity, neurotic levels of self-justification, and almost psychotic accusations hurled at me ... so far as I could tell, all out of the blue. I cannot speak for Wife, but it would not surprise me to learn that she has never used these tools against me unless she felt herself to be under a direct attack by me.

My opinion is that I have never attacked her -- not once. I would not be surprised to hear it if she were to tell me that in her mind she has never attacked me. I can't for the life of me think how else I would characterize a hundred incidents that spring easily to mind, but I suppose that too may be a mirror image situation.

This looks a lot like the build-up to World War One: each nation was engaged in rational steps for self-defense, based on assumptions which seemed to make sense; but each nations's self-defense looked like aggression to others. On the other hand, appealing as that intellectual model may be, I don't especially want my marriage to replicate the Battles of Verdun or the Somme.

So what would it take to de-escalate? To back down? Even better -- wild fantasy! -- to start over from zero? Could each of us make a list of demands, in exchange for which we would be willing to start over? And is there any remote chance we could negotiate those two lists into something that we could agree on in common?

The alternative is probably to start singing Dulce et decorum est pro matrimonio mori. And I fear we are already very close, if not already there. May God have mercy on us.