Throwing a lifeline

I talked with D on the phone Friday afternoon. She told me some of what is going on at her work (deranged, psychotic, dysfunctional ... somehow none of those serene, cheerful adjectives quite seems to capture it) and then we started talking for a bit about our last series of e-mail conversations. With no prompting on my part, D freely admitted that she was being clingy, insecure, possessive, neurotic, demanding ... and that all these things made her completely unattractive. I mumbled because it didn't seem quite nice to say, "God yes!" and yet it was hard to argue with what she was saying here. But then she explained some of what lies behind this unpleasant behavior.

Did I mention that her workplace is deranged, psychotic, and dysfunctional -- and that's on a good day? (In fact, a couple of days ago I sent her this link, because most of the points mentioned in the article match one-for-one with stories she has told me about her job.) She has also been working crazy long hours, getting four hours of sleep a night and then doing nothing but work. Her life it totally out of control right now. And she explained that she has been looking to our relationship to provide some kind of ballast or balance for her. Because her work life is so stressful, she has pictured this to herself as fantasies of living with me happily ever after. Last fall I posed the question whether D sees me as an exit strategy; the answer appears to be "Yes" except that the exit in question is from her job and not (necessarily) her marriage. But as a result she has gotten despondent over not seeing any prompt and decisive steps on my part towards divorce; she has assumed that this means I have definitely decided to stay with Wife forever and ever, and so she can't lean on me.

I gave her several answers to this. One was that I simply dither over big stuff. I'm not always prompt and decisive. Another was that she's a long way away so she can't see the little stuff that goes on ... little stuff which convinces me that the marriage isn't forever because neither Wife nor I want it forever, only it's just not clear when we'll dismantle it. And a third was to ask who the hell appointed her Project Manager for my divorce, or else how had she gotten it into her head that I was responsible to report back to her anyway on what progress I was making? (I was marginally nicer about it than that, but only marginally.) She acknowledged the fairness of that last response, and said the other two were helpful in giving her a better sense of what was going on.

But then she added a remark which may have saved the whole phone call. She said all she really needs, in this swirling tempestuous chaos where she works, is some fixed point to hold onto. Fixed point? Sure. For example, this had been a bad week; but the very fact that we were talking on the phone at all helped her put the week back into perspective. She said, "You threw me a lifeline by calling just now -- really you did." So even if it's just that she knows we'll always talk by phone on Friday afternoons (or whatever), that will give her something to look forward to when it gets bad ... and it will give her some frame of reference outside the workplace itself. If she can't look forward to marrying me, OK fine. (And for any number of reasons, I think it is highly unlikely that we will ever marry.) If she can't look forward to seeing me regularly and often, that sucks but she can cope with it. But just to have something ....

And as I hung up the phone a few minutes later, I thought, "Well maybe we can work this out then." There's no way I'm going to commit to something big like marriage or even permanent cohabitation on such-and-such schedule. But a weekly phone call? Yeah, I oughta be able to handle that ....

So it's progress.