Beyond dignity ...?

Wife and I talked quite a lot this morning, about a number of different topics. One of the themes we kept coming back to is that she is scared of me at some level. Of course I wish she weren't -- if she weren't scared of me, she wouldn't believe I am trying to control every aspect of her life. And that would be a win for each of us.

But talking about her fears got us also talking about privacy and secrecy. I allowed that if you fear you are talking to the Gestapo, it is only natural that you lie to protect yourself. And so maybe this is why she feels she has to lie to me about things, or at least keep them secret. She accepted this but also said she wanted to be able to preserve some personal privacy so that she could hold onto some personal dignity around me.

I have to admit I found -- and find -- this idea of keeping up her personal dignity around me to be odd if not preposterous, and not for the reason you think. It's just that after we have been married for a quarter century, can't we assume that we know each other too well for either of us to be dignified around the other? Haven't we moved beyond dignity?

And I tried to explain with examples. In the twenty-five years we have been married, I said, I have sat by your side during any number of hospitalizations. I have nursed you through diseases that caused uncontrollable vomiting and uncontrollable diarrhea at the same time. I have held your hand through nervous breakdowns. I have cleaned up the kitchen when your depression spiralled out of control and you trashed it, the time when I came home from work to find you sitting in the wreckage weeping uncontrollably and playing with the broken glass from the jars you had smashed. And as for sex (which is what we were discussing when she brought up the subject of dignity), ... haven't we fucked plenty of times over the last twenty-five years? Maybe not as often as either of us would have liked, and maybe our sexual communication could stand to be improved by a whole lot, and maybe it wasn't therefore as good as it could have been for either of us ... but still, it was sex. And there's nothing dignified about sex. I have watched you masturbate. I've seen you fuck other men. Where in all this is there any room for dignity?

If you think I said all this to berate her, you're wrong. My point wasn't that Wife doesn't deserve dignity, or that she has done too many low, base things to have any claim on dignity. Not at all. My point was that dignity means putting on a solemn show for strangers. No-one can be dignified to himself, because he knows himself too well. And after twenty-five years, I don't think anyone can be dignified to his wife (or husband), because she (or he) knows him too well also. At that point, if it is a close and healthy marriage, the two of you are almost one person anyway. There is a reason the Bible speaks of the two becoming one flesh -- because in many ways that is what happens, and not only at a fleshly level. Oh, it is never perfect of course. But there's no way I would try to keep up my dignity in front of Wife, and it would be silly for her to try to keep it up in front of me.

I told her one more thing, after all this -- to try to make the point that I wasn't berating her with this catalog of undignified moments. I reminded her that I love her. And that when I tell her I love her, I'm not talking about some pasteboard cutout picture of her. I'm not talking about some "dignified" image of her suitable for impressing strangers. That's not what I love.

No, the woman I love is Wife herself, as she really is: the woman whom I have nursed through countless illnesses, the woman whose cyclonic tantrums I have endured, the woman who has betrayed me with other men time and again ... the real woman. I told her, "You don't have to hide the Real You, because I already know all about her. And I love her anyway. I love the Real You as you really are."

And she answered, "I don't see how you can. I don't even like the Real Me."

But of course I do.