"Nothing I do is ever good enough"

I have a number of posts that have been building up for a while, mostly collecting (in first-draft form) in my e-mail with D. I’m going to try to get them published soon, so I don’t have to keep remembering to go back to them. But that means that some of them will be out of sequence, as far as any strict chronology is concerned.

One concerns a conversation I had with Wife about two weeks ago, on friendship. We were sitting around one evening – she was unaccountably still awake, and I was waiting up to retrieve Son 1 from a birthday party in a couple of hours. And somehow the conversation wound back around to the question what went wrong between us.

I should add that in some respects, the whole conversation was probably a waste of time for both of us. I think at this point it is highly unlikely that she will ever understand anything that I might want to say about friendship, so in a cynical mood I might question why I bothered to try. On the whole I have been getting better about declining to explain myself, after so many years of trying desperately to be understood and then smashing into the very same brick wall. But staying on the wagon is difficult.

I suppose one small good sign is that I refused to let myself get invested in the outcome. And many, many times, when she would reply to something I had said with "I don't understand what you mean," I answered only, "I know." Sometimes, when she would get particularly anxious that I was "blaming" her for the ruination of our marriage (and this anxiety expresses itself for her as hostility) I would amplify that answer into something longer: "I know you don't understand, because you just can't see what I am trying to talk about. It's not your fault, there's no blame attached -- you just can't see it. So you had no choice all along but to act as you did. It's more a case of tragic inevitability than of injustice and blame." That probably overstates the truth considerably, but the consequence was that it de-fanged her normal response to any criticism, which is to perceive it as an attack by an enemy (rather than, say, a constructive suggestion from a friend) and therefore to counterattack. At one point she actually asked -- softly rather than harshly -- "Are you saying that I have never understood what friendship is?" I replied that to say so was to take my remarks and expand them far beyond anything I had actually said; I added that such an expansion looked to me like a prelude to her taking offense and getting mad. She quickly followed up by saying, "No, no, I mean it. If I have never understood what friendship is, then that is pretty serious and I need to listen to what you are saying." About that time I had to go fetch Son 1 from the birthday party he was at, so I couldn't really carry the ball any farther than that. But to have got her to that point without provoking a screaming fit might be something.

As for what I said (or wanted to say), ... well none of it is really that remarkable and I have said the same thing before plenty of times. I took my starting point from Wife's giving me a status update on the laundry, and we moved from there to her deeply-held belief that what it took to make our marriage a happy one was to do things for me (and for me to do them for her). And so she exerted a lot of effort trying to figure out which things she had to do to make me happy. Of course I have to add that the consequence of thinking this way, though she never seems to have seen it, is that she became obsessed with tasks, chores, duties, and obligations ... which means that (quite naturally) she started to resent it. That's not surprising -- anybody would resent an unremitting diet of chores and obligations. But as a result, over the years she projected all that sense of obligation onto me and began resenting me.

I should add in passing that her mother did exactly the same thing. Wife’s mother was persuaded that nobody could ever like her for herself; so she had to do things for people. On the one hand this made her very busy and productive, and people always thanked her for making their wedding cakes, their wedding dresses, etc. On the other hand, she never got close to any of them because the work always stood in the way between them. In the end, out of the hundreds of people she had done things for over the years, two or three stopped in to see her while she was dying. And she left the world feeling used and largely unloved. But if people used her for what she could do for them -- and failed to get any closer to become real friends -- that was because she invited the first and avoided the second.

So I understand completely where Wife learned this behavior. It's just a hell of a way to live. It is also a behavior so deeply ingrained that I have been absolutely unable to get her to see it. Every time I have tried -- and the attempts have been countless over the years -- my aim has gone astray. Part of that is certainly my own inability to articulate what I mean; but part of it is also, I think, a result of the fact that this behavior is so deeply embedded in Wife's being that it is literally impossible for her to imagine any alternative. It has become (for her) a fact of nature. To suggest to her that she not feel such a sense of obligation about things invites only the response, "But then I won't get them all done, and then you'll be mad at me for not getting them done." And nothing I have ever been able to say has shaken her faith in this fundamental axiom. So, as I said to her that night, I have to conclude that the alternative is something she is literally unable to see, and therefore I can hardly blame her for failing to adopt it.

But the alternative is (to my mind) the only way to achieve any kind of healthy marriage -- insofar as it focusses not on what things you do but on who you are and how you relate to each other. It means caring for each other and the relationship first, not by doing things but by truly seeing each other. And this is hard work.

It is also important -- and this is another distinction that Wife has never understood -- that to say I think husband and wife should approach each other from the perspective of relating does not mean that none of the chores get done. Of course they get done, right enough -- only out of freedom and not out of obligation. At the end of the day the laundry is clean and folded, the dishes are washed, the shelves are dusted, and the floor is mopped -- but not because Somebody Else makes you. No, it's all done because the husband and wife -- who are (in this model) also friends and companions -- want to do it. It’s not that they are working down a checklist thinking, "If only I can hit 95% on this checklist, then the other one will love me." It’s because each loves the other and knows love in return -- and gosh, it is just so much nicer to live in a clean house than a dirty one. It's nicer for both of them. So out of a personal desire for cleanliness, and out of an equally strong desire to delight each other, they get (between them) just as much done as some other household where the couple labors gloomily in the shadow of a huge sense of obligation.

This is what I have never been able to get her to see, and that night was no exception. For her, either the work had to get done or it didn't; and if it did, then for it not to be done would make me "unhappy." The idea of doing it in a spirit of freedom and delight wasn't even on the table as a possibility: only work or play, where "work" meant gloom and obligation and resentment, while "play" meant irresponsibility. And with those as the only allowable options, nothing I could say about the importance of true friendship or true marriage made the slightest difference.

To make things worse, the fact that I didn't see things according to this model in the first place frustrated Wife no end. It meant, after all, that no thing she ever did was the right thing to win my love and approval ... which was instantly re-worded in her mind as "Nothing I do is ever good enough." From here came all the complaints that I am impossible to please, that I am a cruel and unrelenting task-master, etc etc etc. And so she got (over the years) more and more frustrated trying to find the one magic thing she could do for me to make it all OK; and more and more anxious when she couldn't find it; and all the time more and more bitter and resentful that she did "everything she could" and "nothing was ever good enough."

To me, the difference between the two approaches is obvious; but I have no idea how to explain it to somebody who can't see it.

Somewhere along the line I tried to introduce the distinction between Mary and Martha, suggesting that Mary really did have it right: the important thing is not the thousand tasks that have to get done, but the relatedness, pure and simple. Tellingly, Wife said, "I've never understood that story. I mean, when dinner time rolls around they are all going to be hungry; and if there is no dinner to be had, they are all going to be pretty unhappy. So it seems to me that Martha has the right idea, and I have never understood Jesus saying that she was wrong and Mary was right." I forget what I said, but inwardly I just sighed. I keep hoping that sometime before she dies she will see it, and will strike her forehead saying, "What was I thinking?" But if that ever comes about, it will be God's work and certainly not mine.