Talking all morning

Wife and I spent a couple hours this morning talking, before we got up to deal with the day. We came up with a few interesting ideas.

The first one hit me as I opened my eyes: the reason Wife finds me so boring is that we spend no time together. Oh sure, there are the hours we are asleep. But in terms of interactive time, there is probably (all in all) less than she spends IM'ing with Boyfriend 5. What is more, the time we spend together is very low-Quality time because we spend it planning who will drive which boy to which commitment, or discussing what this particular charge on the MasterCard is, or talking about the housework that has yet to be done. If those were the only things I had to discuss with somebody, I'd be bored too.

Back before we had kids, Wife and I used to spend a couple of hours every night talking together; and we often said we couldn't imagine how our marriage could ever function without that time. Of course once we had kids we could no longer find that kind of time, so it should have been no surprise that we started to drift apart. Then the few times we have squeezed out time for ourselves, we haven't known where to start and we have just repeated the low-Quality conversations we have when the kids are around: who will help drive on the next field trip, when we should upgrade the computer, and so on. But that doesn't make for a marriage so much as it makes for a business partnership whose object is to run a household.

I reminded Wife that way back when we first met, we were really in love. She mused that that may have been our best year. Well, I answered, in one sense it had to be -- the sparkle and charm and inner peace that come from newly falling-in-love always fade into something else. You can never keep that forever. I thought this was a mundane truism, but Wife started to cry. She said if that were true then her whole life was destined to be bleak. Why? Because, she said, she needs that peace so desperately; she needs it like a drug to ease the pain that her mind is in all the time; and she can't get it any other way than by falling in love.

Attentive readers will remember that I said something like that a couple of months ago, specifically in the context of Wife's sex life. But she was making a far more general point. OK, I said, but even if this is true your life doesn't necessarily have to be bleak -- there are a couple of options. One is that you can keep falling in love with new people over and over. Another is that you can find some way to treat the underlying pain. Both are possible. And hey, hang in there -- I still love you.

I wonder how much this discussion will matter to Wife later? By the time she described it to Boyfriend 5, it had become all my idea: Hosea thinks I use you like a drug, Hosea thinks my real problem is my inner psychological pain, Hosea thinks that I am addicted to falling in love because it is an anodyne for me, ... but of course I don't think any of those things at all. As usual, Hosea is full of it. I wonder if she remembered the truth and was just lying to Boyfriend 5 because she was ashamed to confess this was her own idea, or if she had already changed her own memory of the conversation so that it registered as one more time I was picking on her? And will she digest and assimilate the idea, maybe using it as a basis for future decisions, or will she tuck it away in a cubby-hole and ignore it? No way to tell for sure, I guess.

Even then, the conversation wasn't over. I asked Wife why she was so passive about so many things. Time and again, she will sit still and wait for me to make basic decisions for her. Then she will resent that I boss her around, of course, ... but why doesn't she make her own decisions in the first place? I'm talking about simple things here, like getting out of bed to eat breakfast if you are hungry. The decision between getting up and eating or going back to sleep isn't exactly a dilemma worth of Hamlet; but Wife will lie abed even though hungry until I tell her it is time to get up. Not every day, to be sure; not all the time. But that it happens at all concerns me.

Wife passed this off as a form of suicidal depression. Maybe it is, but what then can we do about it? I mean, this is pretty basic stuff. What would you do, I asked Wife, if I were to die? She whirled around to look at me and almost screeched the answer, "Die too!" Huh? Is this the same woman who tells her boyfriends how much she hates me, how she only sticks with me for the sake of the kids, how she'll be out of here one and a half minutes after the younger one leaves for college? Is it the same woman who admitted to me a few weeks ago that when I have to travel on business, "maybe 10%" of her mind wishes my plane will crash and kill me? If I die, she'll die too? How does this make any sense? No, she went on, of course she would realize it was her duty to hang in there and raise the children, to make their lives as stable as possible in the absence of a father, to collect on my insurance [nice touch, there!] and so forth. But, she concluded, she would simply want to die too.

Sometimes I get the feeling that the more we talk, the less I understand.