I.O.U.

I think that everything I have written in this blog till now has given a more or less one-sided account of my marriage, because on the whole I have been most prolix when I have been angry or upset. While I have tried to offer a little balance by indicating reasons Wife has for being upset with me, that just adds to the mistaken impression that our life is one of unending conflict. I have not written much about what is good in our home.

I suspect I am too tired to do the subject justice right now, and it should be thought out to be done right. Therefore this post is an IOU for other posts, to be written soon. One of them, in the spirit of recent posts by Melted Candy and Coquette [I'm sure I've seen others but can't find them at the moment], will be a post describing the good things about Wife: the things that made me fall in love with her in the first place, the things that have kept me loving her all these years, the things on whose account I have always found her to be the most remarkable woman I have ever known. Even when I longed to deck her out of frustration.

Another will be a post that characterizes somehow what life is like around here day by day. I get comments to my posts saying that I "put up with a lot" -- but you know, it's really not a war zone. We're a home and a family. We have our problems, but who doesn't? So I think I should give a picture of the day-by-day, as a corrective to the other stuff I have said.

I might write a third post, too, but I don't really know what I would say in it or where it would go. In the last year or so, Wife has gone through a lot of changes. She has lost a lot of weight fairly quickly; she sleeps 12 hours a day; she moves slower; she talks slower. Her voice has changed: for years she had, as she herself put it, "the world's bitchiest voice" [too true!]; now it is low and husky. Her balance is no longer good; nor is her short-term memory. The weight loss has left so much loose skin that, at age 46, she looks 66; she looks frail, for God's sake -- frail for the first time in the quarter century we've been together, frail for the first time since bloody Fifth Grade! (I've seen pictures of her girlhood.) I don't know what this means. It seems like she is changing into somebody else, somebody different from the woman I have always known, right before my eyes. And I don't understand it. So this third post, if I write it, will describe the before-and-after as exactly as I can, and maybe try to come to some kind of understanding about it. I hope I can.

Meanwhile all I can give you is an IOU.

Soap opera

Wife and Boyfriend 5 seem to have reached the stage where they are arguing over the "relationship" ... who loves whom more, who cares about whom, and so on. Is this part of some kind of life cycle of bad romances, or something?

It all started when Boyfriend 5 mentioned that his demon, M, had graduated from doing clerical office work to the status of a full-fledged lover. I continue to be astonished that Wife treats this as if she takes it seriously, but so it appears to be. And this has led to interchanges such as: ...

Wife: Did you get the offline post I left for you last night?

Boyfriend 5: No. What about?

Wife: My behaviour and M.... I wasn't sure you'd get it. It said essentially that I think I know why I've reacted as I have, and you aren't going to like it, but now that I understand it, I can see where some of it is illogical and I can stop it and some of it is at least based on past experience, which is why I did it.

Boyfriend 5: Well, why don't you just tell me and let me decide whether I like it or not.

Wife: Ok. Here goes. Deep breath. In my past experience, when Lover [meaning Boyfriend 5, I guess, although they have still never met in the flesh] tells Current Lover [Wife] all about New Lover [M, the demon] in detail, that generally means Current Lover is about to become Former Lover. That's why I reacted so defensively. Especially since New Lover is able to fulfill all your needs whereas I am not.

Boyfriend 5: Well, .... No, I don't like it, but not for the reason you might think. I don't like that you still have so little trust in me....

Wife: It's not a matter of whether I trust you, ...!

Boyfriend 5: It is, deep down....

Wife: And I said you wouldn't like it ...!

Boyfriend 5: .... Only when you trust me will it stop, and if you don't trust me, it won't stop. ....Hopeuflly, at some point in the future, I'll be able to change your mind....

Wife: I trust you further than I trust just about anybody, ....

Boyfriend 5: But I'll also say that you don't trust me ... I don't know whether "enough" is the right word, but we'll use it anyway. It's ok... I'm used to it.

Wife: Who trusts you "enough"? Does anyone ever trust anyone else that much?

Boyfriend 5: It doesn't matter, but some people do.

Within an hour, this had morphed into ...

Wife: You know what? I could have [taken another lover] over the summer, but I mistakenly thought it might be nice to at least talk to you first because you might care. I was wrong, so the subject is closed. I'll do as I like, and the subject is closed. You won't hear any more about it.

Boyfriend 5: DAMMIT I DO CARE. Obviously *YOU* DON'T SEEM TO THINK SO. So, I gotta go.

Wife: NO YOU DON'T

Boyfriend 5: YES I DO.

Wife: NO YOU DON'T....

Boyfriend 5: THIS WOULD BE BETTER DONE ON THE PHONE, SO YOU COULD HEAR THE IMPORT BEHIND MY WORDS, BUT SINCE I DON'T HAVE A PHONE I CAN CALL YOU WITH, I'LL DO IT WITH CAPS AND *S. HERE I AM TRYING TO HELP YOU, WILLING TO GIVE THINGS UP FOR YOU, TRYING TO HELP YOU IN MY OWN WAY, BE IT RIGHT OR WRONG, TO SEE WHAT YOU NEED, NOT WHAT YOU THINK YOU NEED, AND WHAT DO I GET FOR IT? "YOU DON'T CARE." That, to me, is not someone who doesn't care. If I didn't care, I would have said, yeah, do what you like, and I would have rejoyced when you did and when that relationship ended and left you wrse than before. If I didn't care, would I have offered to get rid of M for *YOU*, to ease *YOUR* feelings, however misguided. NO, I WOULDN'T. IF I DIDN'T CARE, .... WOULD I BE RAISING MY BLOOD PRESSURE UP TO 240/188 HAVING A DISCUSSION WITHOUT YOU ABOUT HOW MUCH I DO OR DON'T CARE? N O!

Wife: All right. I see the logic. I'm sorry it's raising your bp.

Boyfriend 5: So, if you think I don't care, well, then, I guess we are done.

Wife: I take it back. I'm sorry.

Boyfriend 5: Do you ?

Wife: yes.

Meanwhile, I have to wonder, ... Who writes this dialog? Did somebody pick it up on sale at Wal-Mart? Or does Wife just gravitate naturally to the kind of romance that will give her at least a minimum daily allowance of drama? It does seem to me, regardless of what I think of this fellow personally, that this wouldn't be the first of Wife's romantic relationships which was jeopardized by her own insecurities ....

"Why he stays" ... the elevator speech

A comment that Kyra left on my previous post made me think it might be useful to publish the following link. It is to a short piece I wrote quite a few months ago, on an entirely different website, as an abbreviated explanation of why I've never made plans for divorce. You can find it here.

I hope nobody is bothered by the site itself. If any citizens of the "infidelity-blog community" find it uncomfortable, please remember what I wrote here and be at ease.

I won't always be..., 2

I've been thinking a little more about this post that I published last night, and I realized that I should probably explain some of the emotional background that makes my attitude relaxed or resigned if not quite complacent. The short version is that it's really not news.

The possibility that Wife might be some day free of me has been in the air for over twenty years, nearly as long as we have been married. When she got involved with Boyfriend 1, a scant two years after the wedding, she thought about trading me in for him. Already, though, she decided against it because of "all the history" that she had "invested" in the relationship with me. (We had, at that point, known each other slightly over three years, for two of which we had been married. Of course, we started living together within a week or two of the first day we met, so that "history" was pretty compressed.) And, in fact, Wife told me that Boyfriend 1's brother had told him, "If you really love this woman you should persuade her to stay with her husband. They may have problems together, but if she sets up a pattern of leaving a relationship after only a couple of years -- without allowing time to work those problems out first -- that pattern could be bad for her in the rest of her life."

Girlfriend 1, a few years later, asked Wife to leave me and go live with her in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that was the kind of dramatic life change Wife was not really prepared to make.

By the time Wife got involved with Boyfriend 2, we had children; and while it was some years before I ever met Boyfriend 2, Wife was very casual about meeting him in a park while she had the kids with her. At some level, I believe her idea was that it would be good for the kids to get to know him and he them, because that way he would have some idea what he would be taking on in case she were to leave me for him and bring the kids as part of the package.

Boyfriend 3 was a very deep emotional relationship, but the affair was tempestuous and short. He was already married (for the third time) to a woman who wouldn't sleep with him (although apparently they had fucked vigorously and often before the wedding), so the question of a future together was a lot more tangled. And before they had time to get very far with it, his wife found out and brought the affair to a screeching halt.

With Boyfriend 4, as I have noted in an early post, Wife felt immediately homey, comfortable, and at ease; and I am reasonably certain (from putting together little things that I heard over the years) that at one point she offered to leave me to marry him. (He turned her down.) In time, though, his alcoholism became a show-stopper for her as far as "happily ever after" is concerned. At some level she still loves him, though.

And actually, by limiting myself to people that I've featured in the blog, I have left out one or two others. There was a time a few years ago, when I was last unemployed, that Wife had a very serious emotional affair going with the lead tenor from the church choir. (I am reasonably sure that it was never consummated -- at the time he was in the middle of a nasty divorce and had just undergone prostate surgery.) This fellow had the advantages (compared to me) of being self-employed and rich; he was also on an emotional wavelength much closer to Wife's than I am. And I think she believed that "some day soon" she would file for divorce and he would pay her legal costs and then the two of them would marry. And live happily ever after.

There might have been other times, that I can't think of right now. But basically this brings us up to the present, with Boyfriend 5.

Now, the first couple of times that I heard Wife talk like this, I was really upset. I felt terribly hurt for what I thought it said about me, and I felt panic at the prospect of losing Wife. And in fact, during the period when I was unemployed, I think she almost meant it. Wife can't stand being subject to forces out of her control (see my long essay "On power") and there was absolutely nothing she could do to get me another job. She couldn't even strike out on her own because her illnesses kept her from working. Divorce would have done nothing to increase her income (unless she succeeded in marrying Lead Tenor), and it certainly would have increased her expenses. But it also would have given her a sense that she was in control, that she was doing something. And I think her desire to be in control of something could have overwhelmed any sense of how irrational such a move really was. Fortunately I found work.

As I say, I used to panic when I heard Wife talk like this. But she has been talking like this for twenty years, and only once (yes, during that time I was out of work) has she ever said she went so far as to talk to a lawyer. (We never got a bill, though, which makes me think this means "chatted with a lawyer in the supermarket checkout line" or something similar.) So maybe I have just become a little jaded. Or, more exactly, I think I have come to see that Wife's desires exist at many different levels; so that even if she wants something desperately at this level, you can't assume she will want it enough at that level to act on it. This is one reason that I was so struck by the quote from Ender Wiggin that I published a while ago. It speaks to exactly this question.

If I have to come up with some kind of bottom-line assessment, I have to start by pointing out that Wife has always felt a profound internal struggle between the need for Roots and the need for Wings. Before her depression was ever diagnosed, when she had no psychiatric medication at all, her regular springtime depression would always take the form of an inconquerable Wanderlust. At a certain point she would be unable to stand it -- anything! -- one minute longer; so she would hop in the car and start driving. It hardly mattered where she went, so long as it was far away. For several years she regularly spent spring break (back when she was a teacher) visiting a friend of ours who lived on a remote farm eight hours away. (I sometimes wondered if he might have been another lover -- he was single, and Wife certainly had some kind of emotional entanglement with him -- but I never worried much about it. He never left his farm if he could help it, never interacted with the outside world, and was therefore never going to have any long-term impact on my life or our marriage. Wife insists that he told her he was gay. Not that it matters -- neither of us has seen him in years, now.)

So much for Wings. At the same time, Wife can be very cautious, almost timid, about other things. She needs security (Roots) as badly as she needs freedom. The same woman who can drive off into the sunset with no plans and no maps and no preparation won't let our kids go on an overnight campout with the Boy Scouts without checking and re-checking their backpacks against the list of recommended gear. They'll never bother changing into that spare pair of clean underwear, but she has to make sure they have it.

And I think that this struggle between Roots and Wings may explain the dynamic of our marriage, or part of it. However she may complain about me, rail at me, or struggle to break free of me, I think that being married to me gives her a kind of security. She knows she has a roof over her head, she knows where her next meal is coming from, and she knows that somebody will pick up the pieces from a dozen little things that she somehow forgets to do. At the same time, she feels this powerful need for freedom; so she has affairs, gets emotionally involved with other people, complains to all of them about what a prick I am, and talks to all of them about how some day in the future she will be free of this ogre she is married to now and can spend time with them alone. And maybe, ... just maybe, ... this pattern of griping and wishing and doing nothing about it is a clever technique she has evolved to satisfy both longings in a delicate balance.

Or maybe not. I like the idea because it has an elegant intellectual appeal -- and as you have all learned by now, I am a real sucker for that sort of thing. But I suppose I shouldn't go quite so far as to let myself get complacent.

Is blogging bad for my waistline?

Over the last few months I have noticed a very slow but steady expansion in my waistline, and I have tried to figure out what has changed in my life that could account for it. I've decided to blame it on blogging.

This sounds silly or frivolous, and I am really only about 10% serious. But that 10% does have a couple of plausible reasons behind it. Typically the only time during the workday that I have the time or leisure to get any exercise it at lunch; if I spend my lunch hour updating this blog -- or reading others -- that's time spent not exercising. (And it's not like I was a really committed, gung-ho exerciser to begin with.) The other time of day that I spend in the blogosphere is late at night, after the rest of the family has gone to bed; and typically if I stay up late on the computer I have some kind of snack at my elbow.

So there you have it: blogging is responsible for my expanding waistline. Of course, like most things that are bad for you, it's also too much fun for me to want to give it up. I sure hope nobody has come up with a 12-step program for blogging ....

I won't always be....

Someone using Boyfriend 5's account wrote, speaking of Boyfriend 5: And he hates where you are now. Not that you're there necessarily, but that you're there with someone who doesn't appreciate your worth.

Wife replied: I won't always be.

No other discussion on that topic. All the rest of it was other stuff, almost idle chit-chat.

So is this a plan? Or is it more of a pious hope? "Next year, Oh Lord, in [city] with Boyfriend 5!"

I am actually kind of guessing the latter .... Hope I am not deluding myself, and in for a rude awakening.

Counseling 10

Counselor: So how have you been doing this past week? [He always starts this way.]

Wife: I've been sick.

That was how our session began, and it pretty much sums up the hour. Wife explained that she has been sicker than usual since ... well, more or less since January, actually, when her rheumatologist adjusted her medications. And he recently adjusted them again and asked for her to report back in a week, and she reported back but hasn't heard from him since then. And every muscle hurts, and her migraines have been worse than usual, and this probably has something to do with why she has been so depressed and so difficult to live with (her words!). Meanwhile she had an appointment with a new psychiatrist yesterday (since her long-standing one retired and his replacement was fired under mysterious circumstances): he seems OK, but he wanted to get her complete history during the first session and after 90 minutes he still hadn't been able to cover everything. (Anybody who has even a passing familiarity with Wife's medical and psychiatric history will find this no surprise.)

Sometimes these sessions require a lot of (emotional) work. Sometimes they can probe deeply. This was not one of those weeks. People who suffer from chronic pain or chronic illness have a reputation for never seeing any part of the world past their own narrow horizon, and I suppose this makes sense. When you are in pain, it is hard to think about something else. But as a result, we didn't really talk much today about how to make things better between us. The closest we got was to concede that we don't have much time together. Wife is home (or running errands) during the day, while I am at work; I usually get home somewhere between 5:30 and 6:30, and frequently one of the bambini has an evening commitment at 7:00. Wife can't stay awake past 7:30 or 8:00, so I take the child in question to the right activity; but by the time I get home, Wife is asleep or nearly so. And there is always stuff going on during the weekends. Bottom line? We get all our obligations met, but we never talk to each other. On the one hand, I guess this must mean we never fight. (And, truly, we fight a lot less than we used to.) On the other hand, we don't communicate much either, unless it is about the weekly schedule.

And that was our session with Counselor. Not a lot of depth today ...

"We built our own walls ...."

I think I mentioned that Wife has been talking more with Boyfriend 5 lately. Most of it has been inconsequential stuff, talking about books or whether Wife could ever come visit some day. This latter topic is a little funny to me, because I have recently acquired what looks like nearly conclusive evidence that Boyfriend 5 does not live in the country where he claims to live. So a trip by Wife to visit him could be ... interesting. I haven't shared my information with Wife yet, because of the "nearly" qualifier: as long as she is in love with him, she will interpret any wiggle room to his advantage and might close off further chances for me to collect such data. So I wait.

Oh, you will like this. In other news, apparently the demon that Boyfriend 5 was talking about a couple of weeks ago has been pitching in lately to help him with his office work. Personally I didn't know that demons could use computers, but I guess that shows me! I should add that it is remarks like this that convince me Boyfriend 5 is playing the whole story for laughs. I hope Wife sees it that way too, but I haven't discussed it with her. I really, really don't think I am supposed to know this much.

But there has been a bit of discussion about the relationship between Wife and me, and it has been interesting. It almost shows up Boyfriend 5 in a sympathetic light. I'm not sure how seriously to take it, because it's not exactly like he has said a lot lately to enhance his credibility. But for what it is worth:

They had just been discussing Boyfriend 5's other lovers, and Wife said, "I'm getting very tired of being alone. It's hard not to be a bit envious."

Boyfriend 5: I'm polyamorous. I never swore I'd be monogamous....

Wife: I'm not asking you to be. Or even to limit your list of possibilities. I'm merely bemoaning my own lack of list.... I'm simply lonely because I am quite literally alone. I sleep with someone who turns his back on me and never even touches me to pat me on the head, ok? To know you have 15 people at your disposal makes it hard not to be a bit envious.

Boyfriend 5: Yeah, and to know that the reason he acts that way towards you is largely due to me, it's ... hard not to feel guilt....

Wife: It's NOT BECAUSE OF YOU. It was like that before, you have to understand that. I don't want a sex life with [Hosea]! I just want a love life with someone I love! That's different! I'm NOT asking you not to be open with me, not to talk to me ... for God's sake, at least be real with me, or we break down too, and I won't have that.... I just feel badly that I'm alone month after month, when I want to be with you. That isn't going to change until I AM with you, ok?

Boyfriend 5: And how can you say that it was like that before? At least then, he wanted to sleep with you sometimes. Even if you didn't like it. I have made a mess of your life with him, and I can't help but feel guilty and responsible....

Wife: Yes, he did, and whenever I gave in, it was a disaster that left bad feelings on both sides. You brought closure to that, which was a good thing. YOU did not make a mess of my life with him. [Hosea] and I did that ourselves years, many years, before. You need not feel any guilt or responsibility for what we did beginning in [the year that we met]. It's misplaced. You may have helped me realize just how hardened I'd become about it, but that was a matter of getting to know myself, and a good thing. We built our own walls, ... brick by brick. All you did was make it clear to me that we couldn't tear them back down.

Boyfriend 5: How can you say having no feelings for the man you're married to is a good thing? Closure a good thing? I don't agree. I didn't start it, sure, you both started it yourselves, but I sure did finish it, or help it along the road to destruction, or whatever you want to say...I can't deny it. I did, and that's what happened and I feel terrible about it, and that won't change. Before I was around, things were so much...simpler for you....

Wife: I have feelings for him. Of course I do, after all these years. I can't help it. What I don't feel is in love with him, appreciated by him, loved and respected by him. You didn't finish it; MY LOVING YOU did; it was what I did, not what YOU did. You needn't feel responsible for MY actions. Things may have been simpler for me without you, but they were emptier, bleaker, too. Don't you see that? There was no reason to keep going except that I had to for my children and I didn't know what else to do. Your talking about who you're intimate with doesn't really make me lonely because it isn't anything I don't know already; it just reminds me of the fact that when I hang up from talking with you, I will be alone again until I connect with you again, that's all. And I always dread that.... I love you.... With every fiber of my being. I live for the time we spend together. You're in my thoughts whenever we're apart. I fall asleep thinking of you. I wake up wondering when I'll get to talk to you.


I've talked before about how differently we see things, so I won't go to the trouble of whining about each of her criticisms of me, much less trying to disprove them. And after all, logically I have to admit that maybe she is right and I'm the one deluding myself. But some people have talked about how an affair can actually improve their marriage. I think Wife's comments here help explain why we, by contrast, experienced a definite downturn about the time this [up till now purely online] romance first blossomed.

I wonder how and when I am going to steel myself to tell her that Boyfriend 5 really lives in the American Midwest (instead of the exotic foreign country where he claims to be) and what happens after that.

A dream

I had a dream last night, about an hour before getting up in the morning. It was a dream in which I went through all the stages of getting involved in an affair ... except the last one.

The Other Woman was someone who doesn't exist in real life; in the dream I had her pegged as the wife of one of our Senior Management staff at work ... except in reality that particular Senior Manager is a woman. (A straight woman, let me add.) And somehow this dream compressed a lot of getting-to-know-each-other into a very short time (the way dreams so often do). So we met on a business trip, had dinners together (at first in the company of other people), laughed a lot at each other's jokes, talked and talked in ever more personal ways.

Until we got to the point where it was pretty obvious to both of us that the next step was some very serious kissing; and it was equally obvious where that would end. We were sitting, somehow, playing with each other's feet. And she put a finger on the middle of my chest and said, "You know we're going to stop. You know that you aren't the kind of person to go on from here -- neither of us is." And she started to remind me of things that had happened earlier in the dream, during our "courtship." The time that I did this, the time that she did that ... did I remember those? Sure, they were part of the dream. Well, if we were the kind of people who were going to take this friendship any farther than it had already gone, wouldn't we have done different things at those points too? Now that I'm awake I don't remember what any of these details were, but at the time, in the dream, it all made sense. And I had to admit to her, with some regret, that she was right. Going on from there, however enticing, would have been completely out of character.

I'm not sure what it means, that even in my dreams I don't get the payoff after all that growing-closer. And I can still feel the softness of her foot on mine ....

Counseling 9

Wife got stuck in traffic (there was some kind of construction on the road), so she arrived half an hour late. As a result, this session was really two half sessions, with very different characters.

During the first half, Counselor and I talked about how I get anxious when Wife starts describing our relationship in ways that I think are incorrect: "Hosea demeans me," "Hosea orders me around," and so on. Counselor has made the point before that it really doesn't matter whether she is "right" or whether I am "right" about what "really happened": the fact is that Wife feels like such-and-such happened, and so the emotional impact for her is exactly as if it really did happen. He likens this to watching a movie: Wife is watching her movie and I am watching my movie, and what is real for each of us is what we see in the movie, not "real life." So if I am a callous jerk in Wife's movie, then it doesn't matter whether I'm also a noble hero in my own movie; the emotional impact for her is what it is, based on what she sees.

But today he went a little farther. He said he can tell when Wife starts talking like this that I get very anxious -- therefore, that Being Misunderstood is a really big deal for me. And he's right, of course. (You could probably already tell that by how long-winded I get on this blog, as I try to prove that I'm Right and She's Wrong.) But he added that it is an innate reaction (for men, at least) -- one that he feels too -- that when we see something not right we want to fix it. Of course "fixing it" means understanding what is wrong as completely as possible, and then manipulating things so that they work correctly instead. And his point was that -- in human relationships -- it never works like that. He sees the whole goal of therapy as learning to accept how things are; for marriage counseling, this means for him learning to accept your spouse as she [he] is, without feeling you have to fix her [him].

This doesn't make things magically better overnight. In particular, it's not like you can get your spouse to change by "accepting" her [him] the way she [he] is. But the idea is that by no longer beating your head against a wall, you can alleviate some of the tension you personally are feeling and therefore suffer less. And his goal is the alleviation of suffering.

His recommendation, therefore, is at least to be aware of what is going on with yourself when you start feeling like this. So when Wife starts going on at length about what a jerk I am (for example), Counselor will interrupt at a certain point to ask, "Hosea, what is happening for you right now? How do you feel right now, while Wife is saying all these things? Where in your body do you feel whatever it is that you are feeling?" And his goal, he said today, is to encourage his patients to pay close attention to how they are feeling, to understand that they feel this way because they are clinging to a desperate desire to fix something they have no control over, and ultimately to give up this urge to control things as a way of dispelling the anxiety or anger ... as a way of feeling better.

I smiled and told him he was teaching Buddhism. I hastened to add that I wasn't accusing him of preaching a religion of any kind. It's just that there is one level at which Buddhism is not a religion at all but only a set of psychological techniques which can be used by anybody, in the same way that a machine can. He smiled back and assured me he didn't take it wrong. "It's OK, I'd be glad to be sitting here teaching the Four Noble Truths ...."

About this time Wife arrived, and the discussion became a lot more superficial. Counselor started by asking her how she felt. Answer: really stressed at being late, especially because she had left the house on time or at least almost, but then there was all this stuff that brought the freeway to a standstill that wasn't her fault but it still meant she was late. "I see," said Counselor. "And why did being late stress you?" "Because I think it is rude to be late, and because I figured Hosea would be mad at me, and besides we can't accomplish anything if I'm not here and I hate to waste my time driving down here if it is all for nothing." Counselor tried to assure her that the time wasn't a waste and that she could afford to feel less anxiety, and then we shifted into how things have been with Wife.

Basically, she has been sick and her depression has been trending worse; plus her old psychiatrist retired and she doesn't have a new one yet. So she asked Counselor if he knew a psychiatrist that she'll be meeting next week: she picked him out of a list (sight unseen) because unlike the first four or five she called, he was taking new patients. Counselor didn't recognize the name. And we spent pretty much the rest of the session with Wife describing what she is looking for in a psychiatrist: someone who will support the medications she is on now (which have gotten her as stable as I have ever seen her), but also ideally someone who could provide counseling or consultative support for some of the non-checmical sides of her depression. And somehow discussing this took the rest of the session. So it was much more business-like than the first half.

Sometimes that happens in these sessions: when Wife starts describing her history or symptoms, a lot of time can go by at a very superficial level. But I'm going to have to keep an eye on my desire to "fix" Wife as if she were a defective toaster oven. I think Counselor may be on to something there.

"I find out what I really want ...."

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisons were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously."

-- Ender to Miro, Children of the Mind, chapter 3, by Orson Scott Card

Counseling 8

My recent post on power turns out to have been very timely. Wife and I had another session with Counselor yesterday, and many of the same themes bubbled to the surface.

We had started off the day before (Tuesday) with a really pointless argument. Wife recently signed us up for a new cell phone plan. I thought the phone store had sold her a bunch of features we would never use, and I got heated and angry about this. Underneath it all, though, I was mostly angry that they were taking advantage of Wife's good nature; at base, I was trying to be on her side. Of course I didn't communicate any of this in a way that she (or anybody) could understand, and for all she could tell I was saying, "My God, woman, can't you even shop without screwing something up?" So she got defensive and it pretty much went downhill from there.

Fast forward to Counselor's office on Wednesday. Wife tells Counselor, "I'm really despairing. Every so often I get my hopes up that maybe we can make our marriage better, and then something happens like this fight yesterday that convinces me it's all hopeless." Why hopeless? Because (in her eyes) I was so demeaning and insulting and patronizing to her that it shows there is just no room to make any headway -- and after all, I've been like this ever since she stopped working and I think I can get away with it because I'm the only one bringing in any income, and .... Well, you get the picture. All I could say was "I swear to you that I said nothing yesterday that was meant to insult or demean you; and if we had all day, instead of one hour, I would go back through everything I said word by word to explain what I really meant."

In fairness, Wife also explained that she has been having a lot of trouble with her depression generally these days -- she thinks her medicines may be slightly out of balance, but for whatever reason she is finding it hard to keep from seeing things in the worst possible light. She did not mention that Boyfriend 5 has come back on line, and that she spent several hours before our counseling session telling him about our fight and getting his opinion on what a jerk I am. So she didn't give the whole back story behind her complaint, but I know the depression part is true.

I think at an intellectual level she may even believe that I believe that I haven't said anything to insult or demean her, but if so it is a purely intellectual understanding that doesn't touch her emotions. I'm not sure how to do that. This time around, we didn't leave Counselor's office with any great insights about how to improve our communications. But I guess it is a process ....

He’s ba-a-a-ack!

After several weeks of mysterious absence, Boyfriend 5 is back in Wife’s life.

For much of this summer, he has been unaccountably gone; either he was sick (so he said) or he was having computer troubles (so he said) or something. But today he contacted Wife and said all his troubles are cleared up and he is back for the forseeable future.

So they had a good long heart-to-heart talk about everything that was going wrong in his life and all the people he resents and other fun, uplifting topics like that. Wife was quite starry-eyed. In the midst of all this, Boyfriend 5 made a rather unusual offer: while he told Wife that he wasn’t planning to kill me, he did offer to conjure up a demon to attack me.

A demon? Excuse me? Well, apparently Wife didn’t bat an eye at this offer, and the two of them started chatting about the finer points of demonology. But personally, I have to say it sounds a little strange to me. I have no idea whether he is trying to pull her leg – in which case it seems to me that the leg must have come off in his hand, because she appears to have swallowed the story hook, line, and sinker – or whether he really believes it. And I suppose strictly speaking (somewhat skeptical though I be) that I can’t actually prove demonic attack is impossible. That is to say, I think it is most likely that he is making up a story to see how big a whopper he can get away with. But I have to concede the possibility that he might be telling the unadulterated truth.

Incidentally, you remember the electric bill that Wife paid for this swine? The credit card statement finally came. I remember distinctly that he made a big deal of the fact that the electric company was in a foreign country where they do things differently, so he couldn’t possibly pay the bill a day late and have the power turned back on. But of course the credit card statement lists the company to whom the money was paid, and you can find them out on the Internet. They serve northern Texas. I know some Texans think their state is a separate country, but this isn’t quite what he was trying to get us to believe. I have asked the credit company to get some more information before I show this to Wife, because I want it to be irrefutable by the time I do.

So anyway, life is getting more interesting on this front again. And so, just to cover my bases, I would like to ask a favor. Anybody out there who assumes that the threat of demonic attack is no more than laughable, self-aggrandizing bullshit, I hope you are right and please feel free to skip this paragraph. But for anybody else – can I please ask you to pray for me that I be safe from any such attacks, in case they should materialize? For my own part, I have added to that prayer two others: first, that any demonic attack rebound threefold on the sender; and second, that Wife’s mind be enlightened by the truth and pierce the disguises of this charlatan to see him for who he really is. I won’t burden you by asking for either of those too, but if you feel like tossing them into the mix you are more than welcome.

I feel a little silly posting this kind of a request, really I do. But ... you know ... just in case ....

On power, reflecting Kyra

For two weeks I have wanted to respond adequately to Kyra's post "on women's liberation." For one week I have wanted to respond adequately to her post "on power." I knew they would require more or less the same post from me in reply, and that it would be a lot of typing. I'm still afraid it will be a lot of typing, and I'm not exactly sure where I want to go with it. Yes, I've heard many times that if you don't know where you want to go, you're likely to end up somewhere else. I think it is an occupational hazard in blogging.

The topic is the balance of power in our marriage; also, the balance of housework. In my mind -- at least in a perfect world -- these should have nothing to do with each other. In Wife's mind they have everything to do with each other! They also relate closely to her self-perception as a victim, and as a failure, and as useless to the world, and all that depressed stuff.

One caveat, before I get too far. Much of what I describe is how things have traditionally been, or how they were for years in the past. I'm not sure how true this is today. Wife has been going through a lot of changes recently, and I don't know where she is headed. So by the time you read this, everthing I say in the post may be out of date.

Where do I start?

Maybe with a quote. Kyra describes herself as follows:

I am known as one of the most influential people in my large department of my quite large company. I am known as completely competent. If I have a known weakness it is for my passionate perspectives and unwavering convictions. Oh and for being a bit of a bitch at times.

Even in my personal life I am known as a confident person. I have friends who have admitted to being intimidated by me. It's astonishing to me, but I get it. I am both smart and knowledgeable. I am an extremely effective communicator. I know a lot about politics and with friends I discuss it they are often afraid to disagree with me because I know of which I speak. It is that way with many things.

I have been referred to as unapproachable. And I cannot truly understand this. But the person who told this to me specifically referred to this confidence that I exude.

When I read this, my first thought was, "She's talking about Wife!" It was followed almost immediately by the thought, "No, she's talking about the woman Wife always wanted to be and never quite was." But she almost made it, in a number of respects:

• Wife has passionate perspectives and unwavering convictions.


• People have been calling Wife a bitch since ... high school? Grade school? I don't know really, but since long before I ever met her.


• Some of Wife's friends are intimidated by her. Also a significant number of her non-friends. "Unapproachable" describes how a lot of people have seen her over many years.


• Wife is very smart. "Knowledgeable" is a bit iffier ... she believes herself to be very knowledgeable, but every so often it turns out that she "knows" something which is obviously false. On the other hand she knows so much that is true that it is genuinely disturbing when this happens.

Notwithstanding all these strengths, Wife was never able to transmute them into the kind of profressional success that Kyra appears to enjoy. No doubt there have been many little reasons here and there which have contributed to the outcome, but I think the big reasons are three.

• Wife has poor health. This means she has never had the stamina to maintain a gruelling job for long enough to succeed at it. For all her competence and ambition, she could never have made it as a junior attorney, nor as a medical resident, nor -- her true love -- as a musician. (Training to become a doctor would have had the added liability that it would have put her around so many sick people.) Her illnesses stretched her Master's program from one year to two; when she went for a second Master's in a different subject, she got sick enough before her qualifying exams that she couldn't remember a word of what she had studied ... but she was nonetheless (to all appearances) well enough to take the test. She never got that second Master's degree.


• Wife's mental illness was never diagnosed before she was thirty. Result? She made a number of very important career decisions on the basis of a firm intuitional conviction that such-and-such was what she was meant to do ... "meant" by God or Providence or Fate or whom exactly, was never quite clear. Of course, strictly speaking I can't prove she was wrong. Guided by this firm intuition about her fate, she turned down -- at the very last minute -- a full scholarship to a prestigious graduate school to teach for one year at a second-rate high school near where she was living at the time. On the other hand, had she accepted the scholarship, she would have left town only one or two weeks before she and I met. For years she was convinced that this was because we were fated to marry. And I guess she could have been right.


• Wife has poor interpersonal skills. Specifically, she has a lot of trouble reading what other people mean when they say things [so it's not just me -- nya nya nyaah!], and she is significantly worse than average at figuring out the right thing to say back to them. She will respond to what she thinks people meant with what she thinks is an appropriate reply; but when she is wrong about what they meant, and also wrong about the right way to answer even a person who actually meant that, her conversations often seem to be a little off somehow. In the first place, this is obviously a liability in advancing in any career. In the second place, it means that she has always sought out small companies to work in, rather than large ones. After all in a large company, you have to be able to play the interpersonal games well to get hired and to get ahead; in a small company, there is a greater chance that you can get ahead because of native intelligence, and that you might get hired (and retained) regardless of any questionable personality quirks. I bet the University would have been more gracious about making allowances for her health conditions if she hadn't already alienated so many people by the time that she needed the rules bent over her Master's exam.

There are people who live happy lives without advancing up a career ladder, but Wife was never going to be one of these. When she was a little girl, her family was very poor. They went without a lot. There were years in which Wife was proud that she was small enough and limber enough to contribute to her family's larder by jumping into the dumpster behind the local grocery store and fishing out perfectly good food which the store had discarded: bread that was stale but not yet moldy, celery that was kind of wilted but fine in soup, ... that sort of thing. Unsurprisingly, they also lived in a shitty neighborhood with a high crime rate. So Wife vowed to herself early on that somehow -- come hell or high water -- she was going to have a better life as an adult. Since she learned very young that she was always the smartest kid in school, she decided she would use her brains to get her out of that crappy neighborhood and into the upper middle class. Then, as she saw her older sisters marry losers one after another -- losers who beat them and impregnated them and then lost their jobs and ran away -- she vowed further that she would never, never, never let herself be dependent on anybody. She would pull herself up out of the gutter under her own strength, she would triumph over all the obstacles Fate had thrown in her way, and she would owe nuthin' to nobody.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. When we first married, Wife's earning power was higher than mine. By the time our second son was born, she was making maybe half what I was ... in other words, about a third of our household income. (I think that's close to right -- I don't remember the exact numbers.) Then eight years ago she had to go out on permanent Disability. Today she collects some money each month from Social Security, but nothing else. She never worked at any place big enough to offer pensions; for the most part she never worked at places big enough to offer 401K plans. When she did, she never quite took advantage of the plan before something happened and she had to move on to the next job.

Leaving work to go out on Disability was hugely traumatic for Wife. The day she told her boss, she asked me to go in with her and she wept uncontrollably through the entire five-minute interview. Her entire self-image was shattered. It may indeed have been the biggest single blow I have seen her endure. She has had isolated moments of greater anguish, to be sure; but it is hard for me to think of events that have meant so much to her in the long run. Leaving graduate school for good, losing her mother to cancer -- these might almost compete. But the multiple surgeries, the screaming fits when she has trashed the bedroom or the kitchen, even her psychiatric hospitalization or her arrest -- none of these seem to have caused the same kind of tectonic shift in her world that she underwent by leaving work.

We have all heard of men who identified so strongly with their jobs -- with their roles as productive wage earners -- that when they finally have to retire they are left with no purpose in life and die after a couple of months. In many ways, Wife as just like one of those men. She couldn't quite lie down and die, because we had two small children who needed her -- at that time, they were both still in diapers and the younger one had only recently stopped nursing. But it did me no good to try to encourage her by suggesting that she could build new purposes for herself -- and after all, it's not as if her life would be useless because I still needed her and the boys certainly needed a Mommy.

"You don't need me!" she would shriek back. "If I died you could go marry some other woman, who could do things, and who could be productive and contribute to the world, and who was pretty, and whom you could be proud of ... instead of the useless old wreck you are saddled with now!"

And while I tried to collect my bearings from this blast she would fire the other barrel.

"And as for being a Mommy -- sure, I can stay at home and be a Mommy! No problem! But why did I bother working so hard and spending all those years in college and graduate school, if all I was ever going to accomplish in life was to become a Mommy? Why did I go to the trouble to claw my way out of the slums, if all I was ever going to amount to was to become a Mommy? Think of all the trouble I could have saved! Any girl with a cunt and a uterus can do that. There were girls in my high school who were already mommies before graduation -- so it's not like that's any special achievement. They couldn't read, they couldn't do basic math, but by God they could spread their legs and become mommies! And now I'm no better than they are! Go on, Hosea, make me feel good about this. You're telling me that I have fallen back into a pit I swore I would leave forever -- that I am no better than girls who were hateful to me, and whom I swore I would leave in my dust -- that I am just the same as those illiterate sluts that I worked so hard to get away from! Thanks a lot, Hosea! Thanks for making me even more miserable about this! Thanks for showing me that I am totally trapped -- that I have nowhere to turn -- that everything I have strived for in my entire life has failed! That's just great!"

I never knew what to say when she got like this. The vitriol, the hatred, the raw loathing were all so intense that anything I tried to say was wrong and all I could do was hold on until she ran out of steam and fell asleep. And then I would hope that tomorrow she'd feel better. And of course ultimately her joblessness became the new status quo. But it took a while.

Of course at another level she understood perfectly well that she was sick, and that there was no way she could stand up to the rigors of the workplace any longer. Indeed, for a long time before she finally quit working, she lamented that she felt she was really too sick to work, and that she felt trapped into having to work (!) because we needed the money. This was another rant where I could never say anything right.

• If I tried to tell her that she shouldn't work if she was so sick, and that some how we would find a way to get by without her income, then I was being unrealistic.


• If I tried to spell out a few calculations to suggest how we might be able to swing it, that proved that her contribution to the family was negligible and irrelevant (because we could live without it), and therefore she herself was useless and a waste and a failure.


• If I turned around and said that no, of course she was important to the family because her income was (after all) a respectable fraction of our household income, that proved that she couldn't afford to quit working even though she was really too sick to work -- and didn't I have any idea how sick she was?

Yes, actually, it had crossed my mind once or twice.

I should add that Wife isn't this irrational about everything. My point is, rather, that this particular topic hits very, very close to home for her.

Time goes on. And today, Wife no longer rails against being deprived of the working world -- she looks back on it nostalgically, but she knows she is never going back. Wife no longer rails against being a Mommy -- she understands not only that the boys need a Mommy, but that this is the one job still open to her, so she may as well do the best she can with it. She helps out on PTA committees, she makes cupcakes for bake sales, she drives the boys to their endless after-school commitments. In her heart I think she still resents the role, but -- for all her other neuroses -- she does love the boys unconditionally, boundlessly, and (so far as it is possible) selflessly. There may be no-one else on earth that she loves this way, but she loves them. And she even realizes (at least intellectually) that it will do the boys no favors if she lets her own demons interfere with her ability to help out on Outdoor School Day or the Community Relations Committee. So she shakes her head, mutters under her breath sarcastic (if not spiteful) things about her fellow parents, ... but does the work and smiles when she delivers the cupcakes.

Her motivation at home, where the rest of the PTA can't see, is correspondingly less. She doesn't like doing housework -- it brings back too many memories of helping her mother clean other women's houses for a pittance. And she cannot (as one of my former coworkers put it) "get into the zen of it." So for the most part she does as little as she possibly can. She makes our bed, because she can't stand to see it a mess. She does the laundry every week. She makes dinner more often than I do these days (although for a couple decades it was the other way around); this also means she often has to clean up the dishes before she can start. But I do the mopping; Son 2 does the vacuuming; and nobody dusts.

For the most part, this is fine with me. In the abstract it would be nicer to live in a cleaner house, where more of the clutter was put away more regularly. But it is not important enough to me to trade away Wife's fragile and hard-won equanimity about her lot. Wife, on the other hand, thinks I am chronically nagging her to do more housework. For a long time, this accusation baffled me. I am always urging her to take it easy and do what she wants (hoping it will make her happier) -- so where does this come from?

But recently, I think I figured it out. From time to time, Wife will tell me how depressing she finds it living in this house: she is here all day without a break, the carpet is worn through in spots, the wallpaper is old and needs to be replaced, the kitchen is small and dingy ... and the place is cluttered and dirty. When she starts this litany, I try to persuade her that she is not a victim -- in other words, there are active things that she can do to make the situation better, if indeed it really bugs her. For example, she could always decide to do more housework, if that is really high on her list of priorities. When I say this, I mean it as encouragement -- "There are things you can do personally to improve your situation, so be not faint of heart." But I think it sounds to her like I am saying, "Get off your butt and do some more housework, you lazy woman!"

More generally, it is hard for me to make suggestions without her perceiving them as orders. This gets to the question where the power lies in our family; and, not surprisingly, we see it in different places. I think the power is shared; I make a point of consulting her on decisions, and I will frequently do something her way even if it's not my first choice in order to be gracious. Or because I am afraid of her temper ... take your pick. Wife, on the other hand, is convinced that I have all the power because I am the one with the income; so if I muse idly "Gee, wouldn't it be nice some day if we ...," she takes that to mean "Do it today. That's an order. And if it's not done by the time I come home, I'm going to scream at you." The miscommunications can be frustrating.

They are all the more frustrating because they feed on each other; each one sets up the next one. I have told you that Wife thinks I bully her. For my part, I can't see it at all. Do I ask her to do things? Sure, why not? Everybody asks people to do things, as favors. And because I assume that we share power, it never occurs to me that she'll take it any other way. But since she thinks I have all the power, those requests sound like orders. When she finally tells me that I'm always bossing her around and I respond with bewilderment, she'll cite a dozen or two of these instances as proof that I have always ordered her around in the past, so it is only logical for her to assume that I am ordering her around now. Trying to tell her that I wasn't ordering her around back then doesn't do me a lot of good, because from an emotional point of view the damage is done. Maybe that wasn't what I thought I meant, but it is how she remembered the event -- and that has colored how she will understand the next one.

I think this is more or less what Kyra was talking about when she wrote:

But here's the thing about power of this kind - no one can give you power. There is only the power you take for yourself and the power you give away to others. But there is no way of reasoning with someone in this state of mind. This logic will not reach them because their responses are completely illogical. And they are based on fear.

Wife says I was a lot nicer to her back when she had a job. Her interpretation is that I had more respect back when she was productive and working, and therefore was more likely to treat her as an equal. My perception is that I have not changed how I treat her (except insofar as she has become progressively more neurotic), but that the big difference is that she had more self-respect back then and was therefore more willing to treat my casual requests as casual requests. As she lost most or all of her own self-respect, her whole attitude became more and more servile; and she started seeing the same casual requests as tyrannical mandates.

It's a bad cycle, but I don't know how to break it.

Chronic pain

I've spent the evening commenting on other people's blogs and really should pack it in, but this will be brief.

A lot of my descriptions of Wife make her sound like a hard-boiled bitch. Partly that's because I mostly write when I have something to complain about. Partly it's because that's a role she aspires to, often enjoys, and carries off with considerable success.

But there is another side to her -- one which may actually go some way toward explaining the bitchiness as well as the irrationality and much of the rest of it.

Wife is always in pain.

Some days are better than others, of course. Some days the pain is just a dull annoyance, and she can more or less ignore it. Some days it is crippling. And there's a wide range in between.

But Wife has suffered some form of chronic pain for ... well, really I have no idea how long. Different kinds of pain, over the years. Often it is headache -- she suffers from migraines (not infrequently) but seems to have non-migrainous headaches in the background just as a sort of business-as-usual. Sometimes it is backaches or muscle aches, exacerbated by one or more of her medical conditions. Back when she weighed over 300 lbs, it was pretty much every joint all at once: even walking across the room hurt her knees and her feet. She has suffered from trismus in her jaw, and hammer-toe on both feet. Many years ago it was carpal tunnel syndrome. The first year we were married she suffered from a diseased gall bladder that was ready to burst at any moment; for 9 months if she ate the slightest bit of fat or oil, she had crippling stomach pain for hours afterwards. (She went into surgery to have the gall bladder removed one day after the "pre-existing condition" clause in our medical insurance expired.)

There is non-physical pain, too; severe cyclical depression is no picnic. But sometimes I think I put too much emphasis on her psychological pain and not enough on the fact that her body simply hurts. All the time. That can be plenty depressing by itself.

She has been in pretty serious pain more or less continuously now for the past month. For a while she thought it was just a migraine brought on by her menstrual cycle ... but it didn't go away. After a few weeks (during which she kept holding off) I finally took her into the hospital to have it broken. Her neurologist has concocted a cocktail of medications which he phones into the hospital when she just can't take it any more (usually no more than once or twice a year): then she sits there for a few hours with a tube in her arm while the drugs drip slowly into her system. And the next morning she felt great. The headache had finally been broken.

It was back the next day.

At this point she has no idea what is causing the pain. But it is wearing her down. Every afternoon she has a low-grade fever. Every day she is sluggish and lethargic. This evening she told me she thinks her November depression is coming on her early this year because she did nothing all day long. I frankly don't care about her being "productive" every single day, because I think she might feel happier if she weren't so driven. But the thought of her depression coming early scares the shit out of me. On the other hand, maybe it is just the pain. That's a little scary too, because nothing seems to address it.

In all this, I don't want you to get the idea that her doctors are ignoring her. They have prescribed all the normal stuff for pain management, as well as some special drugs just for migraine control. Add those into the maintenance medications she takes for her other conditions, and you have somewhere around 15 different medicines that she has to take every single day. It's quite a collection.

And this evening after the boys went to bed, she sat on our bed taking her vitamin supplements, then her normal evening medicines, and last her sleeping pills; and then she lay down for over an hour trying to coax herself to sleep, while I held her hand and cuddled her. Because after all, once she's asleep she doesn't hurt.

Until tomorrow, of course. And then it all starts over.

Mixed messages

I'm having trouble understanding what kind of a sex life Wife wants between us -- if any. To say that her signals are mixed is to say the very best.

Only a week ago (!) she wrote to Boyfriend 4 that "Life goes on.... but I wouldn't say we have a normal married life. I have started giving into [Hosea] and sleeping with him again, which has made him less angry with me, but hasn't made me any happier. It buys a certain amount of peace, though, and so it's worth it. I could tell you how it makes me feel about myself, but you can probably guess. Welcome to my world."

What is interesting about this is that I have made a point of not suggesting sex for months now. Some time last spring she insisted vehemently -- nay, furiously -- that I leave her completely alone from now on (or at least for the forseeable future), because she was finding herself totally incapable of orgasm either with me or alone and the whole experience just frustrated her. I asked, "Sometimes you enjoy fucking even without orgasm; how will I know when one of those times comes around?" Her answer: "I'll tell you!" Slam.

Since that day -- and as I say, it was some time last spring -- I have scrupulously avoided suggesting sex with her. For the most part I have tried to avoid even mentioning sex. Has it been great? No, of course not. Have I had to make up the difference by myself? Well, that is the logical alternative. But I figure I've lived through worse, so what's the use bitching about it? I must admit, though, ... with this background ... that it puzzles me a little when I hear her say she has been "giving in" to me. Huh? "Giving in" ... to what, exactly? And when? Since I haven't asked for months ...?

It is true that we have fucked a few times since that blow-up, but I have been careful to make sure that every single time it has been at her instigation. Then two nights ago, she did more than surreptitiously start caressing me (which is her usual way to initiate fucking). Once I had tucked the boys into bed and turned out their light, she said "So the boys are both asleep. How about closing and locking our bedroom door?"

You have to understand that Wife has an almost Victorian prudishness when it comes to talking about sex, even though she is rather less prudish when it comes to actual fucking. (And in fact the situation is even more complex than that, as I discuss here.) For her, a suggestion that I lock our door -- expressed in plain English -- is about as brazen, as wanton an invitation as she is likely to make. And I did, and we fucked. She didn't orgasm, but she gave every indication of enjoying herself all the same.

And last night -- one night later -- it was the same thing.

But remember, this is less than a week since she told Boyfriend 4 that she was "giving in" to me in order to keep the peace, to keep me from getting angry. Less than a week since she told Boyfriend 4, in all but these words, that sex with me made her feel cheap and slatternly, but she did it as some kind of commercial transaction to buy a better life in our home.

Less than a week. And in that time her attitude seems to have changed so far that I could almost wonder if it were the same woman, if I didn't already know better.

How is this possible? What can it mean? I wish I knew.

Wife has a blog of her own

For several months now, I have been urging Wife to start a blog of her own. (I have not told her that I write one, because I would rather she not find it. Does this count as having a secret life, then?) She often complains about having time alone in the house with nothing to do, and when she puts her heart into writing she does it well and enjoys it. I also thought it could help her address some of her own inner demons, somewhere along the way.

After months of saying "No, it's probably too complicated, I don't know how, can you tell me how?" she finally opened www.blogger.com and found out that it really is dead easy. So her first post was a couple of days ago. I made a point of insisting that she not give me (or anybody else) the URL, because then she could feel free to write whatever she felt like.

In the interests of full disclosure, however, I really should add that a couple of days later I happened to find the blog very easily. She has taken an assumed name, and she didn't tell me where to look; but Wife is not terribly savvy about covering her tracks. At any rate, let's say she could benefit from Bad Girl's tutorial on "How not to get busted" ....

All of which means nothing more than that occasionally I may get a better insight into how she sees things between us. Well, either that or else it will give me something solid to whine about when I am feeling peevish and petulant. You'll know it's the latter if I start off writing "Wife recently wrote that ... but in reality ...."

With luck I'll keep the petulance at bay. Since one of our chronic problems has been failing to understand each other, however, this could help with that. At any rate, I can always hope.

Does this explain Wife's affairs?

Recently I saw this quiz advertised on somebody else's blog. Answer a dozen questions, and it rates how badly you exhibit each of the Seven Deadly Sins. And I thought "This looks like a riot. I wonder how I'd score?"

Well, you can see the answers below. Not too flattering, but I promised myself when I started this blog that I wouldn't restrict what I said to things that flatter me.

I hope I would have gotten a different score twenty years ago....

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Medium
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Very Low
Pride:	Medium

Discover Your Sins - Click Here