Two conversations with Wife

Very briefly, a couple of conversations from last week.

Last Saturday:

The dicussion started when Wife changed into her nightgown without asking Son2 to leave the room first, and I expressed a measure of shock (after he had left for bed) that she didn't see the need for tighter boundaries around the possibility of exposing her body to her adolescent sons. For a while we went around in fairly conventional circles, with her arguing (in a way that totally missed the point) that her casualness about bodily exposure was somehow a body-friendly and body-accepting attitude. I argued the contrary, that the failure to care when or whether she exposed herself was in fact a sign of disrespecting the body, ... of disdaining it as not worthy to be protected by basic boundaries of decency.

The interesting part is that I think I finally got her to see that her attitudes are profoundly anti-corporeal at a very deep level. Oh, she will say that she affirms the physical, because she thinks that's what good liberals do. But in fact her stock line when I suggest she should cover up a little more is "It's only a body."

Only. A. Body.

I parsed this for her and showed her that a remark like that can only mean that she regards the Body as an "It", an object, a thing, ... something that can be dismissed with the word "only." In other words, at a deep level she does not respect or affirm the physical, let alone nurture or love it. Not at all.

Once I broke the ice by showing her this, she admitted it pretty readily and added that she has been at war with her body most of her life. For a long time the issue was weight. Now her complaint is all the baggy excess skin that makes her look so wrinkled. And another issue is the pain she is in for as long as she is awake. So yes, her beliefs about the body portray it as a kind of car or bicycle that you are assigned but that really has nothing to do with you in your inmost being. I pointed out that this is exactly the message she does not want either boy to imitate, so perhaps it would help if she pretended to believe something else and covered up more often. I also pointed out that this attitude has caused her a lot of heartache over the years.
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The following Tuesday:

Somehow I got tangled in a long, winding conversation with Wife that seemed to have no discernable pattern. It started off hurt and accusatory, went through a long middle period that was more or less neutral and kind of informative, took a sharp unexpected turn into bitter threats (from her) of financial ruin or violence, and finally ended up with her slumping to the ground in sulking and tears.

The most informative part was this. In a discussion of watching Son 1 play sports, Wife said that she makes herself do it because she wants to support Son 1 but of course it's not like she enjoys it herself. I asked her if she never found emotions to be contagious ... so that even if sports didn't interest her as such, she could actually feel joy -- true joy -- in watching him play because of the joy he feels in the game. She considered this for a moment, and then said No. She added that it was strange, but all her life she has heard people talk about emotions being contagious -- such as excitement, for example -- and it has always genuinely confused her. She has never understood why she would get excited just because someone else is excited. And I stopped in my tracks and thought ... wow. This is huge. This may explain it all right there ... I mean, all the horrible social skills, all the emotional miscues, all the self-centeredness, the whole banana. If she doesn't "catch" other people's emotions from them, if she doesn't even understand what that means or how it is possible, then that explains so much. I'm going to have to ponder this a while before I can grok in fullness.