Counseling 4

Why do we keep doing this, over and over? Isn't "doing the same thing and expecting different results" supposed to be a definition of insanity? But after all these years, we keep going to marriage counselors.

Today was our next appointment with the marriage counselor. "How do you feel? What's been going on for you this week?"

What has been going on for me this week is that I don't feel much of anything, any more. I don't get mad. I don't especially get happy. I go to work, come home, make dinner, pay bills, and go to bed. Repeat as needed. And I've started to wonder if maybe this is really the best we can hope for. That was the point of this post last week. Do we even want to fix our marriage any more? Are we willing to do the things it would take? Or have we both reached a point of exhaustion, where we just can't be bothered to stretch ourselves out that far? And in that case, why don't we just pack it in and call it quits? Of course neither of us wants to hurt the children, so that will take a little ingenuity. But if we are fundamentally unwilling to improve things, why try?

So naturally Counselor asked "Well, what do you think is the best case? What would that look like for you?" I had to say I didn't know. I supposed the best case would mean "fixing" the marriage, not because I can any longer summon up some kind of image of what that would be like, but because I know intellectually that that has to be the right answer. So Counselor asked Wife the same question, and she answered "Yes of course I want to work on the marriage because I still care about Hosea very much. But if he expects to make any headway at all, then he has to change a lot of the things he is doing right now!"

She then proceeded to list a bunch of things that I'm not doing and have never done: things like ...

• insulting her intelligence (which is considerable, and I would never deny that)
• ordering her to spend the day on housework (which I have trouble remembering long enough to do it myself, let alone ask it of somebody else)
• telling her what to do every minute of the day (which I really try to avoid doing -- right up to the morning a couple weeks ago when she lay on the bed moaning about how hungry she was and how much pain the hunger caused her, even though it had never occurred to her to stand up out of bed and walk into the kitchen to get a little breakfast)

And that pretty much answered my question for me. If Wife insists that I am doing a bunch of things I have never done -- and that these actions of mine are the cause of all our problems -- then obviously we are living on different planets. Obviously our perceptions of the world, and our understandings of basic things about each other, are so different that there is (practically speaking) no point of common ground. Which means, as near as I can tell, that we are through. The divorce is over. Even if the paperwork takes another thirty years, the important part -- the divorce of our minds and our affections -- has already happened. In other words, we have failed.

I should clarify that I don't think Wife is psychotic. I don't think she hears voices which aren't there, or sees little green men, or anything like that. I just think that she and I understand basic words and phrases in the English language so differently that we might as well not be part of the same conversation.

Of course, nobody gets out of a therapist's office that easily. These appointments are scheduled for 60 minutes, after all. So we spent some more time talking about our feelings. Counselor ended up suggesting as an assignment that we make a point of telling the other one how we feel, even while acknowledging that we don't have a clue why the other one feels differently. Counselor's idea is (among other things) that we can't argue about emotions because they don't have to make sense. They simply are. I have this hunch that whenever we start this exercise, it will soon devolve into an attempt by one or the other to say "Well, I'm entitled to my feelings -- unlike you!" And what will we have gained?

But I guess we'll see ....