Fifth date

I have two or three posts that I'm planning to write, that come before this one chronologically. But I haven't been able to get them written yet, and I want to write this one while it is still comparatively fresh in my mind. Besides, you guys are smart ... you can figure it out.

Last week I had to travel to another city on business. I was going to be gone the whole week, and in past years I would have planned to arrive Sunday night, thus maximizing the amount of the weekend I could spend at home. But that was before D. This time, we agreed that it would be great to have an uninterrupted weekend together; so I arrived Friday night instead, just a few minutes before she arrived at the same airport. (Ironically, this was even a cost-savings to my company; the Friday flight was so much cheaper than the Sunday flight that the savings fully covered the two extra nights in the hotel, and then some.)

Whenever we are apart for long periods, I forget how much I miss being with her; then we meet again, and we can't stop holding each other, and kissing. I'm sure the airport staff was thinking "For Pete's sake, get a room!" And so we did.

Saturday and Sunday, we stayed in bed late -- talking, fucking, and eating breakfast -- until somewhere around noon. Then we went out, strolled around town for a while, found a place to eat, and then strolled some more -- still talking all the while. Monday, I went to work while D visited a childhood friend of hers who lives in the town where we were. And Tuesday she left.

A couple of stories.

The whole weekend long, there were large groups in the hotel. They might have been graduation parties, though they were more likely wedding parties since we often saw bunches of young guys together wearing (for example) identical formal clothes and pink ties. So when we left our room Saturday morning, there was a group of young guys (looking like frat boys) in pink ties congregating in the hallway just across from us. As D and I got into the elevator, she started laughing. She laughed all the way to the car, when I finally got her to tell me what was so funny.

Well, it's like this. We had woken up a little after six that morning, and we left the room something like 11:30. Part of that time had gone to eating breakfast, but most of it ... er, well ... hadn't. And during most of that time, D had been pretty ... ummm, ... vocal. Her sighing and moaning had gotten quite loud on occasion, and we had actually wondered if anybody could hear us. We also wondered if anybody who could hear us had noticed that the sound had gone on, with interruptions, for something close to five hours.

Apparently one of the frat boys in the pink ties had noticed. And so when our door opened, he stole a quick look in our direction to see who was the sexpot who had been moaning all morning. D tells me that when he saw her -- with demure clothes, silver hair, and lines on her face befitting her 55 years -- Frat Boy's jaw dropped almost to the floor. Not to be outdone, she stared at the case of light beer he was lugging behind him, shook her head, and gave him her most matronly look of disapproving scorn. And she held that look all the way to the elevator ... whereupon she dissolved into helpless giggles.

Monday, as I mentioned, D went to visit a dear friend she has known since she was 12. She had a great time, but found that it was impossible to preserve her silence about me and our affair. In fact, when she called the night before to see if her friend was going to be available, she had to say, "I know you are a friend of my husband too, but you cannot let him know I am in town. If he ever asks, you have got to say that as far as you know, I'm in the same town where I live and work." Of course the very first question after a warning like that is always Why? And that is how D, who has been scrupulously careful about not telling anybody about us, came to tell her friend.

Her friend was very supportive, but she did have some questions:

Why exactly are you cheating on your husband? Has he cheated on you?

No.

Has he mistreated you in some other way?

No.

Well does he know about it, then? Is this something he is OK with?

Certainly not.

What about Hosea? You tell me that you and your husband will be divorcing ... is Hosea leaving his wife?

No, never.

Well then, does his wife know about it?

I'm sure she doesn't.

How do you know?

I talk to her on the phone almost every day. I'm one of her best friends.

But she doesn't know?

No.

If Hosea isn't leaving his wife, and if she doesn't know about your affair and therefore isn't making time for him to see you, then where does this leave you?

It leaves me seeing him a few times a year, when he can get away from the house and make a plausible excuse.

That's all?

That's all.

And that's OK with you?

No, but it's worth it.

D? You know I'm your friend, and you know I'll stand by you through anything. But I guess I'm having trouble understanding this. After everything you've told me, I just don't see how you justify this affair ....

I don't. Honestly, there is nothing that can make it right. I could sit here and tell you all about Hosea, and it still wouldn't make it right. But I am so in love with him that I have to make do without insisting on being right ....
__________

And you know? That's kind of flattering to hear ....

It was wonderful to see D for a few days; the talk was insightful and the sex was fantastic. And every date makes me fall farther in love with her. Now if only I knew when we will manage number six.

The incredible shrinking boyfriend, cont'd

D was on the phone with Wife the other day, and got the latest installment in the saga.

Friend (who knows everything there is to know about Boyfriend 5) told Wife that Boyfriend 5 has been having a lot of trouble with pain lately (because of his various illnesses), so he has gotten re-addicted to opiates. He knows that Wife would never accept this in him, so he secretly checked himself into a methadone clinic where he will be totally incommunicado for eight years. (I don't make this stuff up, I just write it down.) Wife told D this means she'll have to postpone eloping with Boyfriend 5 until he is out, eight years from now. Then she mused, "I guess it wouldn't really be fair to Hosea ... taking the best years of his life and then leaving him completely bereft and desolated by running off with Boyfriend 5." D, for her part, was wondering, "Why would you make plans to run off with somebody that you don't even know is real?"

Wife also told D that Friend has trouble keeping his stories straight. Wife is starting to wonder (so she says) whether Friend could be delusional. "He tells me he suffres from Asperger's Syndrome ... could that make him hallucinate some of this stuff?" (No it couldn't, D thinks to herself. Asperger's is a whole different thing.) Apparently she has not considered the idea that this is all fiction. That's just one of these rotten ideas that Hosea suggests.

The incredible shrinking boyfriend

I suppose this is as good a time as any to summarize the developments with Boyfriend 5. Basically, he has been dropping farther and farther out of Wife’s life. At the same time, the slack is being taken up with his Friend (whom I may have to christen “Boyfriend 6” if this keeps up, but not yet). So it is not like Wife is spending any less time online or on the phone ... it’s just that the object of her affections has appeared to shift.

You all know that I don’t believe the stories about Boyfriend 5: that he is a terrorist from the Old Country, and a trained magician who can teleport, and a vampire. Well, I am pretty sure that Friend is an equally ficitious character concocted by the same (real-life) person. Interestingly enough, Boyfriend 5 has never talked to Wife by telephone. Friend does; and he explains to Wife that the reason his voice sounds like a woman’s is that his vocal cords were damaged in a bad accident a few years ago. Wife appears to accept this explanation unblinkingly.

Anyway, the story about Boyfriend 5 – pretending for the moment that the basic narrative is all true – is that he has gone for weeks without contacting Wife in any way. Wife has been pretty unhappy about this. She points out that, “A year ago we were inseparable. A year ago it was a big deal for him to go even a single day without talking to me, and if he was going to be offline absolutely unavoidably, he would do whatever it took to get word to me of what was going on. Now I can go for weeks at a time without even knowing what city he is in.” Oddly enough, Friend generally seems to know where Boyfriend 5 is, at any rate if Wife gripes to him about it.
“Oh yes, he told me he had business to take care of in This Place or That Place.”
“By the way, he asked me to tell you that he won’t be online for a few days because he got mad at his laptop and threw it into the lake.”
“Boyfriend 5 has been really ill for the last couple of weeks, and it will probably be another couple of weeks before he is well enough to talk to you.”
Somehow Boyfriend 5 is always able to get word to Friend, but it is progressively harder for him to communicate with Wife.

His growing distance hasn’t stopped him from developing new skills, which Wife explained to me with some admiration one evening. I don’t know if I ever explained that Boyfriend 5 is nearly blind; he has something wrong with his eyes that means he needs a screen-reader for his computer, that he cannot tolerate anything more than trace amounts of light, and that he cannot focus at all well to see. This disability has been part of the story for a long time. Only it turns out now that he also rides horses competitively – you know, dressage, steeplechase, that sort of thing. And somehow he does this while blind, an achievement that just knocks my socks off. He also manages to compete even though he has all these political enemies who want him dead; for some reason he has not the slightest worry about being shot by someone hidden in the crowd while he and his horse are prancing in full view of the judges.

As Wife has spent less and less time with Boyfriend 5, she has spent more and more time with Friend. They talk on the phone for hours every day. At one point he even claimed to be in love with her, although she wasn’t at all sure what to do with this sudden declaration. He has asked her to write sexual fantasies for him, and to post them on the Internet. (She found a site for this and has posted a few under an assumed name.) Most recently, he has gotten her avidly involved in some kind of online game about horse breeding ... I guess this was when the conversation about horses started, during which Wife learned the news about Boyfriend 5’s new skill in this area. So this is where her hours go, most days.

But Friend may have overplayed his hand. Recently he told Wife that he had to come to our town for business – that he was, in fact, already here. Does this mean Wife can go meet him? Well, ... no, actually not. I suggested to Wife that this would be a great opportunity for her. I also suggested, not to put too fine a point on it, that it would be useful to discover whether Friend was real or not. Wife said he would never consent to showing up merely for that purpose, because he would resent the suggestion that he owed me anything (including proof of his physical existence). But I countered that this isn’t about me at all. This is about whether he is any kind of friend to her ... whether they have any kind of relationship at all, regardless what sort. After all, I went on, friends do things for each other. Friends do things for each other, sometimes at considerable inconvenience, if they truly care about each other. So if Friend truly cares about Wife, he wouldn’t want her to have to endure all the skepticism that she gets from me. Allowing her to meet him – allowing us to meet him – would be a favor he did for her! I can understand that he doesn’t owe me a damned thing. I even agree. But what about Wife? Does he (who once proclaimed his love for her) care about her so little that he wouldn’t be willing to do this? Does he care so little that even when I was away for several hours running errands, he could find the time to telephone (from his cell phone, so there was no local area code displayed) but he couldn’t find time to drop by the house to steal a kiss? Really?

Annoying fellow that I am, I have pointed all this out to Wife and asked her to think about the implications. Is it truly believable that a real-life, flesh-and-blood person – who also loves her or even wants to call himself a friend – wouild treat her this way? Or is Friend’s behavior indicative of something else? I proposed two alternatives: either he doesn’t really exist, or else he doesn’t care about you. Pick one. Wife has said very little in reply.

D tells me, however, that Wife is listening. In their phone calls, Wife admits that she is having serious doubts about the whole Boyfriend 5 / Friend melodrama. So D tells me that she is encouraged that Wife may in time pull out of this obsession with an unreal world, and try perhaps to engage a bit more with the real world instead. It would be a great thing if D were right. I guess we shall see ....

Looking for rocks to throw

Gosh, it has been a long time since I posted anything much. Let’s see if I can do something to bring the story up to date.

After Wife and I met with Counselor (this is back in early April ), and after my subsequent conversation with D, I decided to try a couple new tactics. Neither of them is exactly rocket science, but it had been too long since I had done either. The first was simply to try to be nicer to her, without waiting for her to do it first – just out of generosity. What I told myself was, “When she says something irritating or accusatory, don’t take the bait; just hold her instead.” The second was related: to pay a little more attention to our interactions: what I feel like saying and doing, what I actually say and do.

The plan was simple enough. But it turns out that there is a cost to paying attention to what is going on inside your own head, namely that you may not like what you see. You’d think that marriage counselors would have racks of little pamphlets in their offices, warning about the risks of sudden resolutions like this.

So a couple of days later, Wife and I were talking about something inconsequential, and I caught myself scanning the conversation as she spoke looking for things I could find fault with. And all at once I saw myself doing it, and I thought, "You know how Wife says I am always criticizing her? Well, maybe I am.” This was a very unpleasant thought, although I realized even at the time that I wasn’t planning to say any of these things. But I started picking this observation apart in my mind, to try to understand it better. And I realized that often (maybe not "always") when Wife and I are talking about anything that might have some practical consequence in the real world, I am on the lookout for ways in which she might be made wrong ... not necessarily to use them all, but to have them in reserve as tools for self-defense, just in case I need them. Now if I am collecting these rocks as I find them on the ground in front of me, ... how can I suppose that she is never going to notice? Wife may not follow intellectual arguments as well as she used to (what with the effects of illness and a certain “hardening of the categories”). But it does not stretch credulity to suppose that she is still very perceptive where something could affect her own emotional well-being. So yeah, she probably sees me pick these rocks up and pocket them, even when I was obviously unaware I was doing any such thing. And what is she going to think, in that case? That I'm picking them up out of compassion? Out of antiquarian interest? Or that I'm planning to use them against her? Again, that's not a stretch. And so we get to one of the core things she believes about me.

This was a really uncomfortable moment, as I pieced it together in my head; and it was not exactly easy for me to write D about it later. On the other hand, I think the self-awareness has to be valuable, because now I can watch myself do this (when I do it. Maybe some day I'll even be able to stop it, but being aware is the first step. It also gives me a little insight into how Wife might have gotten where she is now. I am pretty sure that I started looking for openings like this, where criticism could be possible, as a preparation for self-defense against Wife's almost unremitting criticism. Well, back up a generation: if Wife, in turn, grew up getting such unending waves of criticism from her mother, what should I suppose she was going to learn as a self-defense technique? Obviously, it would have made sense for her to learn to be hyper-critical, ... which in the event is exactly what happened. So since I understand how it came about (and can see the process at work in myself too, if not – God willing – quite so far along), maybe I could bring myself to be a lot more charitable about her hypercriticism of others. Again, awareness is the first step.

There is nothing here to be proud of, but I hope it may show a way forward.

Follow-on to Counseling 24

The night after we met with Counselor for session 24, I discussed the outcome on the phone with D. We came to a couple of conclusions.


At one point, I was telling D how hopeless I felt about the prospects for following Counselor's advice, and I used the example I gave in the preceding post: that if I tell Wife "I'm feeling blamed right now" her answer will be "No, I'm just defending myself against you because you are being so controlling and dominating." (In other words, "Yes, that's right, I'm blaming you.") As I summarized it to D, I am afraid to name my feelings to Wife because I am afraid of being smacked down. D laughed and asked two questions. First, very specifically, how much worse could the smack-down possibly be than what I am already living with every day? Second, more generally, how well do I think our current methods of communication work?

Ummm, ... OK, fair enough. Point taken. They don't work at all, so I guess I have nothing to lose by trying something else instead.

In the ensuing days, I tried to put this into practice. What I found was that it was difficult to remember the whole ritual of saying, "When you said X it made me feel Y." So I opted for something simpler: to pay attention, closely, to what I say to Wife; to try to avoid saying harsh things so far as I can; and to replace words with gestures (hugs or other physical contact) when I can't think of anything nice to say.

The idea to hug Wife more often is one I took from Kathleen Norris's Acedia and Me. In chapter 10 ("The Quotidian Mysteries") she writes about the power of repetition:

A recent study that monitored the daily habits of couples in order to determine what produced good and stable marriages revealed that only one activity made a consistent difference, and that was the embracing of one's spouse at the beginning and end of each day. Most surprising to Paul Bosch, who wrote the article about the study, was that "it didn't seem to matter whether or not in that moment the partners were fully engaged or even sincere! Just a perfuctory peck on the cheek was enough to make a
difference in the quality of the relationship." Bosch comments, wisely, that this "should not surprise churchgoers. Whatever you do repeatedly has the power to shape you, has the power to make you over into a different person -- even if you're not totally 'engaged' in every minute."

So there.... Let's hear it for insincere, hurried kisses, and prayers made with a yawn. (pp. 187-188)

Of course I'm not quoting this article that Norris quotes (and that I have never even read) as a panacea for everybody's marriage. But I also figured that it doesn't cost much to implement. If it turns out to have any benefit, so much the better.

The short answer, though I may be getting ahead of myself here, is that it did seem to work some. Or at any rate, there seemed to be some kind of positive correlation between my increased levels of affection and Wife's improved reports about our life together when she talks to Counselor (and D). Of course there were bumps along the way, but they belong in a later post.

Could this be remission?

I wish I had time tonight to catch up on all the posting I haven't done. The last two or three weeks have actually been kind of busy: I've been ... trying out a new-and-improved dynamic with Wife, ... calming D down from a major emotional fit when she realized that Wife and I still fuck occasionally (I honestly didn't know that she didn't know this), ... screwing up at work in an altogether slipshod kind of way, ... keeping a straight face as the soap opera with Boyfriend 5 has gotten ever wilder, ... and so on. As I say, busy.

But all that is going to have to wait till I have a little time. Not tonight.

However, I should mention that Wife saw her rheumatologist today. This is the fellow who has been monitoring her lupus for nearly a decade, the one who told her about five years ago that he doubted she would ever see remission. Well, over the last few months he has been ramping down her chemotherapy to smaller and smaller doses. As she has lost weight, he has reasoned that she didn't need as much. And he has been watching how her test results look after he decreases a dosage.

Today he pulled her off of it completely.

Now, strictly speaking this is an experiment. She might flare. He might look at her lab results in another three months and decide to put her back on it. We don't know yet.

But he told her that he thinks maybe she has reached a point where she can be symptom-free without medication. And that is the technical definition of "remission." It would be pretty cool if she reached that point, after so many years of assuming she would die first. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.