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 ....