E-mails with D: Do I patronize Wife?

Here is the second of my e-mail threads with D. The basic question is whether I am patronizing to Wife, an accusation which I have discussed in various terms here and here and here and here and here. (But don't get the idea that this is a running theme in our marriage.) You may recognize a couple of other topics I have discussed from time to time; I will try to provide links where useful.

As with the previous one of these posts, this one takes its start from the first e-mail where D and I talked about Wife flying to the Old Country to visit Boyfriend 5 and his family. As before, I have put my words in green and hers in blue.

Hosea: Of course I am worried about her taking such a trip, but the "normal" fears of a husband whose wife is visiting a boyfriend form the smallest part of that worry. A much bigger chunk is devoted to worrying about what happens to her if and when she gets to [Capital City] airport and (as I strongly suspect) nobody ever shows up to meet her? Will she be able to improvise new plans -- such as to decide to take herself to a hotel and maybe see the sights on her own until her return flight? Ten years ago, I would have had no worries on that front at all; it would have been obvious to me that [Wife] could hold her own in a strange city by herself. But in the past few years she has delegated more and more organizational details to me, and she gets tired a lot faster than she used to. So I find myself wondering.

I can imagine less savory alternatives, as well. Perhaps she takes a taxi to the physical address she has for [Boyfriend 5]. What kind of a neighborhood is it in? Is it a safe place for a solitary foreign woman loaded with baggage to walk house to house trying to find somebody who isn't really there? Every large city has some neighborhoods where that would be a bad idea; but I don't know where those neighborhoods are in [Capital City], and I fear she could find herself in one after the taxi pulls away. Of course she would recognize it for a bad neighborhood, but she might explain that away on the grounds that [Boyfriend 5’s family] would naturally have to live in such a place because their political activity is seen as criminal by the [Old Country’s] government. In other words, her faith in the storyline could override her natural instincts and good sense.

It's not too hard to construct other nightmare scenarios as well, and I have thought of a lot of them.

D: Your invented scenarios seem more imagined than real. Oddly, the most helpful source for my understanding here is a film called "Into Great Silence" which chronicles the lives of several monks in a monastery. One new monk from Africa was the focus of several quiet shots which lasted many minutes. Stripped of all the clutter and movement which disfigures so much of our existence, I began to see him in a way I rarely see and love even those closest and dearest to me. I might suggest affording the same privilege to [Wife]. Listen at her, and you will learn how she feels about your worries regarding her safety. With me, [Wife] has discussed at length how patronized she often feels by your solicitous concern. She says that since she's been ill and unable to work, you decided her judgment is poor and not to be trusted. This infuriates her, but more honestly, it has hurt her deeply. I have no idea whether her intellect has been in some way compromised by her illnesses (her bookshelves seem peculiarly frozen in the past, without new volumes, but she simply may not have the desire to read or own many new books) but if so, you need to address that difficult issue squarely. Asserting that she is not being honest with you or herself and thus making poor decisions will not do as an excuse to control [Wife]'s behavior and chastise her. No adult should accept such behavior; it compromises one's sense of freedom and dignity, issues even more sensitive now that her physical condition is fragile. [Wife] is highly intelligent/ and /highly defensive and suspicious; I cannot imagine her, a [slum] child, stumbling around the streets of [Capital City] like a character out of "Bonfire of the Vanities". And neither can you...either you wish to control her travels, for all the reasons which are painfully obvious despite your denials, or she is not as mentally capable as before. You have said nothing about her mental health outside of her constant fatigue to indicate she cannot navigate a strange city (that said, I must be honest and admit that one of the very few times I ever addressed [Wife] with some asperity is when she declared she could not read a map. That's ridiculous. It may not be as easy as parsing Latin for her, but anyone can learn to follow spatial directions). She will survive, although she may wish she had not.

Hosea: As for whether my concerns for [Wife] are patronizing .... Maybe they are. But [D], they are founded on observation. Do you want examples, anecdotes? I mean, most of them are too trivial to bother recounting as stories, except that they add up to a consistent picture when you put them all together in a mosiac. I know [Wife] is an intelligent woman; I know that she has a strongly independent will. I also know that when she gets lost and upset and flustered, she pulls off to the side of the road and telephones me to ask where she is [as if I knew!] and how to get where she is going [ditto!]. This doesn't happen *often* but I think that is partly because she has made a point for the last several years of not driving anywhere that she doesn't already know, if she can possibly avoid it. On the other hand it happened as recently as last summer. I would feel scummy giving you the details, purely because I don't like to spread that kind of story about the woman I love. I'm not very comfortable telling you even as much as I just did.

Do I question her judgment? Yes, sometimes. Not because she is no longer working, but because she has made choices that are bizarre and inexplicable. Not most of the time, of course; but then most of her choices most of the time are routine. And the few that are really out there have been pretty dramatic, which means they may have had a disproportionate impact on my expectations. Again, I find myself in an awkward position here. On the one hand, I feel like I am accused of being irrationally overbearing, domineering, controlling, ... all for no reason, just to gratify some base lust for power or dominion over others. But the only way I know to defend myself against such a charge is by telling you stories that no gentleman would ever tell about his wife, be they never so true. I don't know how to resolve this particular bind, especially since [Wife] is a dear friend of yours. (If you were an anonymous stranger on the Internet, it might actually be easier because you wouldn't know either of us and so it couldn't possibly matter.)

You suggest that I should address this issue "squarely." I don't know how to do that, and I would be terrified to try. A couple years ago, one of [Wife]'s doctors ordered a big batch of psychometric testing done. I forget the exact results now, but they came out showing strong peaks (as always) in some areas, and surprising valleys in others; the "overall" score -- which the tester said upfront was a meaningless index number -- showed "average" intelligence. [Wife] took this number *deeply* to heart, over the repeated objections of the tester not to treat it seriously. And she was suicidal over it. I don't think she actually made any attempts, so maybe "suicidal" is not quite the right word. But she surely *talked* like her life was over, ... as if there was literally *no* value to surviving if she couldn't boast an overall IQ that was significantly higher than "average" ... as if to be "average" (as measured by a meaningless index number on somebody's report somewhere) was the same thing as being consigned to Hell. [D], it was scary. She wept, she moaned, she shrieked. Her mind, she said, was the *only* thing of value she had *ever* had; if it was now "lost" then she had lost all value, and it was time to end it.

She doesn't talk like that any more, but I am still way too scared to open up that particular topic any time soon. This may be cowardice on my part.

D: IQ scores…God, [Hosea], they are terrible. I have asked never to know mine, or my children’s. As [my husband]’s mother wisely said to her son, “Your intelligence is high enough to allow you to do anything you would like to do”. Other than that it’s just a number without significance, much like SAT scores or your GPA or any other single mathematical measure. What matters is the heart, the experiences that shape us, the ability to forgive and re-create, the wit that brings laughter without harm and the music that under girds everything good. I know well enough to know that what you say about [Wife] is true, and I’m as horrified as you. Forgive me for not understanding fully what addressing the subject of her intelligence would mean. Forgive, forgive. I need to stop; tears blind me. Take care; Godspeed.