E-mails with D: I love you

So far, I have extracted three substantial threads from my discussions with Wife’s good friend D. (See the posts here, here, and here.) A fourth has started – as I have asked her what she thinks of the relationship with Boyfriend 5 – but I have to table it for the moment because it has hit an fairly unsatisfying dead end. Maybe I can get something out of it later.

In the meantime, though, something else was going on. Because I have extracted chunks of text from D and not given the whole e-mails intact, I have had to cut out some of the stylistic touches, the asides, the salutations, and so forth. And over the last couple of weeks, these have taken on more and more a very particular color. I have to add that, being a simple-minded fellow but a gifted mimic, I soon found myself writing in the same way.

OK, scratch that. There is something – not a lot – to the "gifted mimic" part, but I wasn’t purely simple-minded about it. At first I thought she was just being colorful; after a while I was pretty sure it was more than that, and I had to weigh what I thought I should be saying back to her – but also, truth to tell, what I wanted to say back to her. And this got more and more delicate over time.

I had better start giving you some concrete examples, so you have some idea what I am talking about. As always, I have put D’s words in blue and mine in green.

It started off simply enough. After her visit (reported back here) I dropped her a note as follows:

Hi D!
Just wanted to drop you a quick note. [text snipped] ... It was great to see you. Your visits are always too short. All our love ....
Best regards,
Hosea

She replied:

Dear Hosea,
Thanks so much for writing; it was wonderful to hear from you!
[text snipped]
To honor honesty, I should tell you how impressed I was during my last visit by your energy, your ability to laugh and love, and your reference to those elements of life-the Greeks, family, intellectual zest and knowledge in diverse fields-that have inspired you for as long as I've been privileged to know you. You seem to me to have come to a point of wisdom and surprising youthfulness after a period of great trial and difficulty. I honor and respect you; I feel fortunate to call you 'friend'.
Take care; Godspeed.
D

A little while later, she wrote asking if I could suggest books on a certain subject for a student, and it was all straightforward:

Dear Hosea
I hope you are well!
[text snipped]
Take care, be well, and thanks for any help you can provide.
D

And I answered:

Dear D,
So good to hear from you again.
[text snipped]
Love as always,
Hosea

But then I sent her the letter quoted here and got back the reply quoted in the same post. And here is where things seemed to change a little. Partly this is because we were discussing much heavier things – the kinds of things I write about here. By the end of one of those letters, I found myself emotionally pretty drained, and I assume it was similar on D’s side. And this affects how we wrote. Leaving aside all the substance to focus on the trivia of salutations and conclusions, we now had ...

Dear D,
[text]
Love as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
Take care; Godspeed.
Love,
D.

My dear D,
[text]
Love,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
Godspeed and much love,
D

Dear D,
[text]
Lots and lots of love, as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[Text. This was the e-mail I discussed here, where D insisted that love could be sustained on the basis of words alone. However, I had earlier suggested that it made no sense for Wife’s frame of mind to be so warped by the impending mortality driven by her diseases (bear with me, it's off-topic right now); and D sharply disagreed, insisting on the centrality of physical life to any notion of the good or any kind of redemption. Again, mostly this is off-topic except that it sets up a remarkable last paragraph, as follows ....]
My children are right. I can't write emails, only letters. I trust you to take what is valuable from the rest; I hope that you know of my sustaining love for you. It's odd to even talk about love after writing about the importance, no, the necessity of physical love. I'm not sure what else to say. On some level, I do believe in love knit together by the appreciation for the gifts of mind and spirit. If it is not finally sustainable without the physical...that's something I will have to think about. I know I still feel your last embrace, hear your laughter, see your devoted boundary-setting with your children in my mind. Does that count?
With very much love,
D

Dear D,
[text]
With great love, as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
All my love,
D

Dear, dear D
[text]
I have to go for now. But my thoughts and my love go with this mail to you.
All my love,
Hosea

About this time, we got into something of a struggle about the topic I mentioned up above as a dead end. D had heard something from Wife that she thought explained part of the relationship with Boyfriend 5, but that wasn’t going to have any impact on the here-and-now. I wanted to know what it was, and D thought it would violate a confidence to tell me. We disagreed about this for a bit, and I pouted but said that of course if she didn’t think she could tell me then that was that. I was probably a little too sulky in the way I said it, because what I got back was:

Dearest Hosea,
Gosh, I'm really being mis-understood this time. I thought you were beginning to realize that I seem to be unable to deny you anything. Hosea, I simply don't make pronouncements that can't be discussed.
[text]
I would do almost anything to spare you fear and sadness. Right now, I share your sadness. What can I do to help you understand better?
All my love,
D

In my reply, I kind of fell all over myself apologizing because I really had been an immature prat in the way I had tried to pout information out of her. But then the next day we had the exchange of e-mails on the subject of child abuse, which I have reprinted here. That post contains four e-mails we exchanged the same day. The first two are reproduced in that post, complete and intact. The second two had some stuff sliced out, because it belongs here and not there, as follows. (I have repeated bits and pieces from what I quoted before, when it kind of belonged in both places.)

Dearest Hosea,

[first two paragraphs as given before]

As I suggested in an earlier email, I never truly knew you for years because Wife rarely said anything complimentary, and I spent little time with you. What happened that morning [several years ago when I was talking] with you was a true awakening, a clear and shining moment revealing why the well-being and concerns of yourself should claim my attention. Intuitively, I guessed what you might be, and despite your love and devotion for Wife, and the lack of any place in your affections for me outside of a certain enjoyment of my patience and autodidact turn of mind, it still seemed worthwhile to try and restore you to a place of honor within your own family, with my friend and your wife. I'm well aware that I have few tools to use, and even those might do more harm than good. But it seemed worthwhile to try. I honored and respected your desire to live honestly and your eighteenth century notion of honor and how a gentleman ought to behave even in the most difficult situations resonated deeply with me. If Boyfriend 5 was exposed, and Wife realized your love for her and responded with devotion and gratitude, that, I thought a little bleakly, might be reward enough for me

I am willing to make almost any sacrifice for you, but it is helpful to know what exactly is demanded. You should have told me about your depression and despair. My guess is my son, so like me, picked up your sadness and loneliness easily when he stayed with you. This afternoon, I saw a level of helplessness and and despair in you that remade the entire situation. It is not that I haven't read and re-read your letter. I believe who you say you are. I also, after today, know who you think you are. Hosea, I will give you to Wife, but not to despair. I'm not asking you to put me first, but I will say a third time, that the gift of my friendship and love should not be beyond you to accept.

My prayer? Let us be ourselves.

All my love,
D


Dear D,

Thank you. Very much.

This was a very difficult afternoon. And honestly, it has been a very difficult week. I have been surprised and startled enough this week that when I read your letter early this afternoon I have to confess I had no idea -- despite your many reassurances up till now -- what to expect.

"Surprised and startled"? Whatever for?

=====BEGIN LONG EXPLANATORY DIGRESSION=====

Where to begin? For years, our friendship (yours and mine) rested on a comparatively superficial level. I enjoyed your enthusiasm for ideas, and I was flattered by the fact that you listened to what I had to say and responded; but -- as you rightly point out -- we spent very little time together. As a result, you fell in my mind into the broad category of "Wife's Friends." Granted you were one of the most charming and delightful of the people in that category, but we saw each other rarely enough that the category was adequate.

Even more recently, we haven't spent a *lot* of time together, for the simple reason that we live [thousands of miles apart]. But the times we have spent together have recently been somewhat more concentrated ... intense ... than they were before. During this last visit, I have to wonder how Wife felt about it that you ostensibly came "to visit her" as being "her friend" and yet almost none of the conversation included her. Not that she was deliberately EXcluded, but it was as if she excluded herself ... or as if we were so busy talking to each other that she had little chance to break in. Maybe you remember it differently; but I felt a little funny about it at the time -- and I assume that if *I* felt funny about it, Wife must have felt ten times as funny. It did seem to me that I got a much more enthusiastic or demonstrative greeting and parting from you than she did. Did she notice that too? Did you?

And then, just in the last week when we have been mailing each other a lot, the whole verbal style of our mail has changed. Words like "dearest" and "all my love" can be simple conventional formulas to open and close letters, but they sound less like conventional formulas when the letters they bracket say things like "I still feel your last embrace" and "I seem to be unable to deny you anything." Now please understand, I'm not complaining or accusing: I've been writing in *exactly* the same way to you. I sit down at the keyboard, hear your voice in my head as I read your latest e-mail, and it seems like the only way to write ... the only way I *can* write. Only I think it is not how we *used* to write to each other, on the rare occasions that we did, and so I don't have a lot of familiar landmarks to orient myself. It has been difficult, in the last week, for me to know where I am.

On top of that, I have hurt you inadvertently more times in the last week, I think, than in the 18 years before that. I hate hurting people. I especially hate hurting people that I care about ... that I care about, indeed, more deeply than I long imagined. But it was always inadvertent ... which means that every single time I thought I was saying something innocuous right up until the moment you read it. And then somehow it turned into a weapon to wound you. The result is that it has been difficult, in the last week, for me to know what I am saying.

I think part of the reason I have hurt you so much and so often in the past week is precisely that, in many ways, I still don't know you very well, ... or at any rate not nearly well enough. If you tally up the hours we have spent in each other's company, the total number still isn't all that big. So you can use a word like "friendship" and to you it is quite clear what you mean by it. But I don't necessarily know for sure what friendship means TO YOU. As a result, I will say something -- out of uncertainty or anxiety or caution -- that genuinely hurts your feelings because you have already *said* you are my friend and it is perfectly obvious to you that *no* friend would ever do this or that. And when you say it, of course it is obvious to me too, and I feel terrible for having said something different. Only I didn't know until then that friendship really included this or that for you, since some people use the word without meaning those things. Or, in short, I have not always known what you are saying either.

In summary, this week, I have not been able to tell very clearly: (1) where we stand with respect to each other; (2) what I am saying to you; and (3) what you are saying to me. And this has left me singularly ill-equipped to know what to anticipate next.

=====END LONG EXPLANATORY DIGRESSION=====

[Then there follows the substance of my second letter as posted below in green. But after wrapping up the stuff about Wife’s absurd allegations of child abuse, I concluded as follows.]

Last comment for now. Your very last words [above] are, "I will say a third time, that the gift of my friendship and love should not be beyond you to accept." I must beg you to understand that I *do* accept this so far as I understand it. Please, please, please recognize that any time I say or do something which looks to you like a sign that I have not accepted your friendship and love, it does *not* mean that. All it means is that I have not understood the connection between this thing (whatever I did or said) and your friendship and love. It's not that I am being stand-offish or disdainful. It is just that I don't know you well enough yet. So please be patient with me on this point.

I wish you were here. I think we could communicate better in person. Even the telephone isn't really good enough for this kind of conversation. Also, far more important, there is a kind of comfort in touch and presence that words cannot match -- the momentary pressure of fingers on a hand, the embrace when words fail, even just the quiet sitting together in the same room. I look at what I write on the screen, and it is never enough. Often it isn't even quite right. But touch and presence are not available to us right now, so words will have to do in their stead. Please forgive me and be patient with me when they fall short of the mark or miss it entirely.

I must close. Maybe later I will be able to see the whole of your letter below more clearly, so that I can answer it with more light, and with less storm and stress. Maybe later we can once again take up some of the other things we have talked about. But I am tired and grow inattentive. Best I close now, before I lose track of what I am saying.

All my love,
Hosea

And that brings us up as far as late Thursday night. Friday about lunchtime, I posted my quick note that the plot had thickened. That was the time that I got this e-mail.

Dearest Hosea,

Thank you.

Just a few comments before I get ready for school.

Hosea, I never meant to fall in love with you. If you feel awkward and unsure, know that we share this confusion. I knew I was close to the edge when I saw you last in [your city]. I left that evening because I realized I did not trust myself around you after Wife went to bed; I wanted you and was determined to spare you the net. Since you have loyalties which are more complex than mine, the conflict would be unsupportable. I might do you harm...it is certainly more than I could contemplate, and there are other factors against me, that you know of. I meant to shut the door, but I have not been able to do so very well, have I? I know from Wife that you have seriously considered establishing another relationship with a woman and using your home for meetings [WHAAAT??? See below!!]; I am not possessive, but my hunger is difficult to deny. It has been years since I have had sex; what I have with [my husband] is companionship, deep respect and laughter, but none of the passion I feel for you. At least you know the truth now; I seem unable to conceal much from you any more.

Slowly and with some reluctance, I think I will ask you to tell me about those years with Wife that [my son] glimpsed on his visit. I have long felt that those times were exceedingly dark. [My son] told me he spent hours in the shower, unable to stop his tears. He remembers your frustration and anger at his behavior. I was alarmed and frightened; for the first and only time, I called his priest ([my son] is Orthodox, you will remember) and asked for help. I removed him as soon as possible, and he ended his Latin lessons soon afterwards, although recently, he has discussed resuming them at [college] and perhaps majoring in history as well as chemistry. I will not ask [my son] about his visit; I trust whatever you are willing to tell me.

Perhaps a little light on how to go forward. Hosea, simply hold me to your standards of ethics and morality and see if I am worthy to be your friend. You don't just talk about friendship; you discuss the art of relationship in lucid paragraphs that could be lifted from a textbook, and then it's philosophy and then ten other subjects for as long as you have the patience to stay with me. I remember so clearly you quoting an entire page of Aristotle to help me build an argument, smiling, with the patience of a master. And you wonder why I am enamored? :-) I am quite willing to be held accountable to any standard you deem necessary and appropriate. You can probably assume that if your definition of friendship includes a certain virtue, mine either does, or needs to, and you can say that. What you really can't do, and what is hurtful, is to diminish my love by believing that somehow, while you grasp it intellectually, it is out of your reach physically and emotionally.

Yes, I wish we could touch each other. More than you know. I understand restraint is the remedy, but I occasionally, mutinously, think it also disposes of my happiness. Most of the time, I remind myself that I decided to put your interests and love for Wife before my own interests, and I remain committed to that objective. But you should not doubt that my sentiments are genuine and for you alone.

Take care, be well. Godspeed.

I love you,
D

Hosea....this never reached you this morning; email failure. I admit I am emotionally exhausted. The air seems to hurt my skin today; I'm over-sensitized and defenseless. I had the students write essays, which means endless paper grading for me, but it was all I could do. Even simple tasks seemed beyond me. My room-mate (I share a classroom) asked me to take a test he wrote for his standard U. S. class. I had to pause and focus when a question came up on the tariffs of the early nineteenth century-did they help foster sectionalism? Of course. But I had to think before I could even lock onto the question. I hope you are better rested and more confident. I haven't felt this insecure for a while. Sigh* Do take care.

And I had to decide how to respond to this! Well, fortunately, as I noted before, D and we live a long, long ways apart; so any practical decisions will have to wait regardless. But naturally I had to say something. Here is what I said:

Dear, dear D,

First things first: of course you are worthy to be my friend. Never doubt it for a moment. And never doubt that you have my love. I don't know what that will mean for us in the long term -- love is an infinitely protean thing, and the situation is a little complicated. :-) But you must know that I could not write to you the way I have all week -- the way I did last night! -- if you didn't have my love secure in your keeping. Indeed, I look at the last week and have to smile (through all the turmoil) at how shamelessly I have neglected my job at work in order to write you, read your replies, and write again. Hours, D, hours.

You ask (at least implicitly) about my standards of ethics and morality and friendship. It's a fair question, except that I try not to live my life according to a handbook. A principled life isn't like consulting a checklist: good, better, best, ... whoops, missed a box at item #4, three points off. It's more like just paying attention to what you are doing, with love and honesty: honesty foremost to yourself, and to others so far as it does not put you in direct peril. The down side is that it can be harder (this way) to decide what to do; the up side is that when you finally do decide, you truly know both that it is right and that it is what you want. Besides, checklists are awful things -- who wants to live by them? :-)

Over the past six months or so, I have spent a lot of time reading and commenting on a community of "infidelity blogs." These are blogs by people who are actively engaged in an affair, or who have had an affair in the past, or who are still physically faithful (for the moment) but are strongly contemplating an affair in the future. I think I may be the only regular commenter in this community who is writing from the other side of the bed, so to speak ... since my perspective is absolutely that of the "cheated-upon" (if that is a word). But you know, I like these people. I really like them. When you corrected me a few days ago on the question whether love could subsist entirely on words, I realized you were right because the people in this blog community know nothing else besides each other's words ... and yet, at some level, we can become friends. Do I believe in the importance of marriage as a permanent commitment? Obviously. Have I ever cheated on Wife? Never. But I wouldn't dream of criticizing these friends who have made different choices. All of them are wrestling with difficult stuff in their lives; the affairs are only part of that. Sometimes I might offer advice -- "You know, if you do X then I fear it could blow up in your face" -- but that's the only appropriate thing to say. I could never condemn them, because I know they are no worse than I am. All I can do is offer friendship and support as they struggle with their lives. And -- importantly -- they reciprocate. That's what friends do.

I'm only telling you this by way of saying that -- for me, at least -- it's not about "standards" as some kind of abstract principle carved on stone. It's just about love -- the whole spectrum from agape through philia to eros and especially all the interesting little grey zones in-between. :-) At one level true love *includes* standards -- because they are good for the beloved -- and a lot more besides. Of course, I have to admit that not only does true love include and impose standards, ... but sometimes it also inspires active mutiny against those very standards. ;-) Love can be very complicated.

D, dear, I have no idea where this leaves us. Right now, today, I have to agree that "awkward and unsure and confused" pretty well sums it up. For today and tomorrow and next week, it leaves us at any rate [living thousands of miles apart]. And I think that together we will have to figure out where the path leads after that. Right now, I'm not going to second-guess where that destination might turn out to be. But if we figure it out together in love and honesty, it will be right.

There is one point I must clear up. You wrote, "I know from Wife that you have seriously considered establishing another relationship with a woman and using your home for meetings." I have no idea where this came from, but it is absolutely false. I cannot imagine why Wife said such a thing. I don't even know who she's thinking of. I suppose, if I stretch my imagination, that the only person she could possibly have in mind is a co-worker in our IT department: she is a friendly woman, and once every couple of months we go out to have lunch together. But it's lunch. She and her husband are trying to adopt a child from China, so I commiserate with her about the frustrations of that process. I tell her, in turn, about the things you take for granted that change overnight when a baby enters the house. But that's it. And I am just guessing that this is who Wife means, because she is the only other woman with whom I have any significant social contact at all. I don't get out much. :-) Anyway, to jump from lunch to "another relationship" is purely false. If a private investigator had followed me around for a year and eavesdropped on every single word she and I have ever exchanged, he would have found nothing more incriminating than sandwiches and potato chips.

But now I start to wonder why Wife said this. I have no idea whether she KNOWS it is false, and is telling lies deliberately; or whether she has brooded on my (infrequent) lunches with this woman and jumped to conclusions; or what else it could possibly be. Any of the explanations I can think of would alarm me. The most I can say to account for something so bizarre is that it seems to be of a piece with the (more painful) discussion you and I had yesterday. Did she say anything to give you a clue of what her data source was? Did she say "I think that ..."? Or "Hosea told me that ..."? Or "I asked the Magic 8-Ball and it said ..."? Or did she not say? Any way you look at it, this is very, very strange.

I don't want to end on such a depressing note, however. Let me end, rather, with an attempt at encouragement. It is no surprise to me that the air hurt your skin today, because you started the day stripped bare and it is scary to feel so exposed. Here, take my jacket, wrap up in it, sit down by the fire with me, and get warm. I love you too. I don't know where we go from here, but be of good cheer -- we'll figure it out. And when we figure it out, it will be both right and what we want.

Bright blessings and all my love,
Hosea

So there you have it. That brings us up pretty much to the present. D is in love with me. I certainly love her too, although as I pointed out there are a lot of different kinds of love. At the moment I am not 100% sure which of the thousands of varieties this is. (Seems to me I remember having this problem in college!)

The odds are that it will be months before we have any opportunity to see each other again. Plenty of time to think and mull and plan. And I have been thinking already, some. But hey, since I’ve posted the story out there for all to read ... any thoughts? Comments?

Suggestions?

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