Looking back and looking forward, part 2

When I sent D my e-mail Saturday evening, she replied immediately. But then it took me a couple of days to get back to her.

And, truth to tell, I wasn't quite sure if she had understood what I was saying. Here was her reply to me:

Dearest Hosea,

Thank you for writing. It’s hard to answer such a bleak note, so perhaps I will just let it stand as a warning. I’m not sure how to ‘answer’ it at all. The comparisons to Wife are painful and on one level, perhaps also fundamentally untrue.

Let’s see if I can sift this a bit and illustrate what I mean, because I want to acknowledge some of what you said. It is true that I can ‘hear black’ when you mean white, but the larger contention is not something I accept, and that’s my inability to change, my inability to finally understand. You are wrong about that. You give up far too easily, you back away and I’m left with nothing but confusion and frustration. Where exactly did I go wrong? How can I get him to explain what he thinks again, in terms I might understand? And is it possible that my views, however wrong, are perhaps a legitimate misunderstanding caused by confusion at these particular points? ... [T]he point about change is vital. If I can’t change and see your viewpoint, I am not worth your time, energy or financial resources.

Let me try and provide a tiny snapshot of myself to show you what I mean.... [She then described steadily coaching one of her students to become a better driver.] Sure, I’m a teacher; that’s what I do. But you have the same responsibility towards me ...; you have to break it down for me instead of saying, “I know you don’t understand. It’s not your fault. You can’t understand me.” You have to believe I can master the subject and try again. Stop me and insist that I listen more closely (none of us listen very well; I’m convinced that the reason God does not make himself visible and instead demands that we ‘hear the word of the Lord’ is because no real understanding is possible without repeated attempts to hear). Hosea, without that belief and effort,you are condemned to loneliness far deeper than my empty house and bed and my small, dying community that offers precious few opportunities for real friendship. I own the loneliness, but honestly, the comments you make in the first paragraph of your letter may apply to yourself more than they apply to me. And that’s a new insight.

I agree that taking a break from discussing how to pay for possible holidays is a good idea; you are right to say that sometimes, new understanding resolves what looked like an impasse. My school schedule is easily explained; .... [Then she listed her breaks for the rest of the year.]

Hosea, I do not expect you to be all things to me. We share a suspicion of marriage as an institution and I, like you, prefer to occasionally sail my own ship solo. But that doesn’t mean denying the possibility of understanding, or accepting that our love is very difficult beyond what is true about life in general; it tends to drive you to your knees and frustrate your best attempts to control either your outward circumstances or your inner life. I think you have to have a little more faith in both yourself and me. Very smart people are often very lonely people, and you are no exception.... It does no good to call for more bitterness and rancor; just the opposite is needed if anything worthwhile is going to be accomplished. I would urge you to bring back one of those topics you have declared ‘off the table’ (home ownership is a fine topic) and let me hear your views again. I can’t think of a better gift on these long winter nights…like the ‘littlest angel’, who gave the Christ child his humble box of treasures collected as a child, a stone from the river, a robin’s egg, a butterfly preserved…you might bring me your ideas and let me consider them again. I’m not saying I will always agree, but I know that discussion is far better than polemic or isolation and at its core, far more humane and loving. The Christmas story reminds us that precisely the earthly gifts we present to each other are the most valuable because God created and embraced them, and includes our communication. The efforts we make to understand, forgive and acknowledge each other are far more valuable than…visits and time together, because without the former, the last is just physical presence, and that’s not truly what we want.

Can we try again?

You have all my love, forever and always.
D

I was glad that her letter was so sweet ... that she didn't just get madder for my continuing to delay the job of setting up another visit. But I wasn't quite sure what to say next. Should I just drop the current topic and pick up some older one we had discarded? If I went back to discuss the corner we had just painted ourselves into, could I say anything without it degenerating into whiny accusations? I wasn't sure. So in and around my other duties Sunday and Monday, I mulled this for a while. We exchanged a couple of short notes, each of us making sure the other hadn't fallen off the face of the earth. But they were clearly placeholders.

Then finally today, while I should have been doing something useful or productive at work, I managed slowly to piece together the following letter, as a next step.

Dearest D,

You are right that I give up easily, far too easily. Partly that comes from an intense aversion to conflict. (Shyness? I've always called it cowardice.) Partly I can get skittish around outbursts of intense emotion, at any rate negative emotion. (And yes, I realize that must sound very ironic coming from someone whose outbursts are as noisy as mine.)

But I would never, ever patronize you by saying "You can't understand." Notwithstanding anything I might have said in my earlier letter, you are emphatically not Wife. Of course you can understand. You don't always, and sometimes when I feel particularly skittish or depressed I can despair of finding a way to make you understand. But it has nothing to do with incapacity.

When that happens, though, you tell me to try again. Keep at it, walk around it from a different direction, but don't give up. You say that several times in your letter below, and of course you shouldn't have to say it at all. I should know by now that hanging in there -- not giving up -- is the only thing to do.

So maybe it would be useful for me to give you some of the background behind my letter of Saturday evening -- the one you called so bleak, and that you answered so sweetly [above]. My thought is that it could explain how I got to where I was when I wrote it, and maybe from there we could both understand what was going on a little better.

I had better pause for a moment first, though, and say that this story doesn't show either of us in the best light. Please understand -- please, I am imploring you here -- that nothing I write is meant as criticism or blame. If there is blame to go around, honestly I think the majority of it is mine for not handling the situation in a more proactive or productive way. So I mean the account to be purely diagnostic. I didn't write it before for fear of how it would sound, and only your reassurances below that understanding is the critical thing have persuaded me to write it now. Remember that I love you.

With that said, let me back up to Friday morning. I had gotten an idea Thursday night of a place we might go; and Friday morning (once I got to the office) I set to work online making reservations. I secured the vacation time from my boss, booked the hotel, ... and came within one minute and two mouse clicks of committing myself to a little under a thousand dollars worth of non-refundable travel plans for dates that I had not cleared with you. Fortunately I stopped long enough to read the fine print, and that slowed me down enough to stop and think about what I was doing. I thought ... got up from my chair and walked around my office ... walked down the hall for a cup of coffee ... and thought some more. Finally I came back to my chair and exited the website without giving them my credit card information. I went back and cancelled the hotel reservations (those were refundable) and then tried to take a long look at myself.

Why was I doing it? To prove something, of course. To prove that you were wrong when you wrote that "there are two worries that need to be put on the table. One is my concern that for a myriad of reasons, you prefer to live with Wife.... [And the other is that to] see me without your work paying for much of our expenses changes the equation." But that's crazy, isn't it? Was it really going to "prove" anything positive to you for me to do something so remarkably foolhardy ... especially when you were still adamantly insisting that you would never fly anywhere on tickets I paid for? Was it going to make it better that I hadn't confirmed the dates with you? Really? Wouldn't that just "prove" that I needed my head examined? And -- come to that -- why did I think I needed to "prove" something anyway?

A lot of questions.

So I spent the next two days -- that's Friday and Saturday -- staring at those questions from several different angles. And the longer I looked at it, the wider the scope became, because I was trying to figure out how I had gotten so close to a precipice of such craziness. Pretty soon the question had changed: it was no longer just when to plan a visit or how to pay for it, but whether to see you again at all. Ever. That sounds just as extreme, even just as crazy, as those surprise reservations I was making; but I was shaken by things, and so I started calling everything into question. That's where I was when you wrote me that you were "irritated, but waiting" and "frustrated by what [you saw] as foot-dragging and dithering" while you were "asked to bear most of the burden of separation and silence." [I didn't bother quoting or excerpting this letter. It was part of a sequence of letters that I passed over through brief allusion in the first paragraphs of this post.] Normally -- even a couple of days before -- a letter that sharpish would have wounded me deeply; but by the time I read it I was already so far out in the wilderness that the darts sailed clean past me.

In the end, of course, I came back to myself. Yes, I wanted to see you again. No, I wasn't going to let myself fall off the precipice, in either direction. And that's about the time I wrote my letter Saturday evening. I tried to say very little about the wilderness my mind had been wandering through, but I think some hint of it slipped through in my remark that my attention kept "sliding back to the big picture." I don't know if that was enough for you to understand how far my thoughts had gone ... that I had actually entertained the notion of breaking it all off.

But how did I get there?

I guess the first thing that I see when I try to look at the situation objectively is the feverish volatility of my own emotional reactions. Not that any of this volatility was visible on the outside; on the outside I am sure that I was quiet, placid, ... maybe a little more thoughtful and removed than normal, but nothing else. But inside I was careening from one extreme to another. Incidentally, I think that this may be part of why I withdraw sometimes (perhaps not always): namely, that I have learned to silence my outside when my inside is agitated, until I calm down and come back to myself. I suppose I fear that if I reported regularly on everything that was going on inside, it could sound pretty alarming -- especially since the extremes probably aren't where I will end up when I am done.
What was the trigger, that I was over-reacting to? Plainly it was the discussion of planning a visit; but I think there were several distinct factors in that discussion, each of which contributed its own kick.

• In the first place, our discussions on this topic have always been pointed and difficult, so I had a certain amount of pre-existing apprehension right from the beginning.
• The longer the discussion went on, the sharper and bitterer your voice sounded to me (I do not say this is what you were trying for), and this (perceived) sharpness and bitterness agitated that part of me that is scared of conflict.
• Your letter of Thursday evening, November 4 (that's the "two worries on the table" letter) made me think that you believe two things about me which are fundamentally at odds with the rosy, flattering image I like to cherish about myself: to wit, (1) that my love for you is shallow or fickle or unreliable or meaningless; and (2) that I am a cheapskate. That you could harbor such worries made me feel strongly that I needed to make some chivalric, gallant, extravagant, even desperate gesture -- a "grand geste" -- to dispel your doubts once and for all, forever.
• You didn't seem able to hear anything I said. OK, perhaps at the beginning I should have expected that you would respond to my extreme proposal (to pay all your [travel] expenses [to see me] forever) with another extreme proposal (total financial separation); that much is only natural. But then when I offered a compromise (let's do it this way for a couple of trips and then maybe forget it in the future), you refused to budge. When I said explicitly that dogmatic adherence to principles would torpedo us, you stuck to your guns. And when I said that the one thing above all else I wanted to avoid was having to talk about money, you suggested an approach which would ensure that we had to discuss every penny. I began to feel that one of us was speaking Chinese, and my frustration at not being heard made me -- again -- ever more desperate.
• As a garnish to all this -- it's a tiny thing compared to the rest, but it struck me disproportionately so I have to mention it -- you went on to say that your earlier acceptance of my frequent flyer miles was done with "trepidation." (This was in your letter of Friday morning, November 12.) And of course maybe it was; I can't read your heart. But I would never have guessed it from the tone of our e-mails and phone calls, back in January 2009 after our first two "dates." We discussed my frequent flyer miles quite a lot back then, and the tone as I read it was something I would have called ... well maybe I shouldn't go quite as far as to say "sharpish and demanding," but you were certainly prepared to tell me that you supposed I must not want you to use my miles if I hadn't already gotten off my duff and planned something, so probably I was saving them for some heart-warming trip with Wife and the boys. And by now you know that that kind of sullen sulk hits me like a slap in the face. (You might not have known it back then. Come to think of it, those e-mails sounded a lot like our more recent conversations ....)
• On top of this all, of course I knew that any sharpishness in your tone grew directly out of missing me, that it was all an expression of loneliness. And I didn't want you to feel sad or miserable. I didn't want to be the cause of such an ache. So on top of all the external stimuli, I did also feel guilty at somehow not holding up my part of the bargain ... at leaving you in the lurch.
• Then this last feeling, call it "sympathy" or "pity" or whatever you like, nurtured a growing feeling of obligation. And I think a sense of obligation is somehow poisonous to an affair. Of course, we can't help but build up webs of mutual obligation with those we love -- and that's true for all kinds of love. But when I realized that the experience was starting to feel like marriage -- and that there may have been some connection between that feeling and my willingness to engage in recklessly irrational spending just to make a point -- well, that's part of when I began to step back and re-evaluate the whole thing: "If this is just going to turn into another marriage, who needs it ...?"

Those are the elements I can tease apart. They all overlap and bleed into each other, of course. There may be more, that I haven't put my finger on.

Please remember that I don't say any of this by way of blame. I repeat that if there is blame to be allocated, the lion's share is mine: I know how alone you are, I know that it is hard to have anything to hang onto when there isn't a date in the future, and I know that nobody deals with indeterminacy very well. Knowing all of that up front, I should either have scheduled something right away or else said clearly, "Look, I don't know when it will be but not for a while." And I didn't. That you got frustrated with this situation should surprise nobody.

Are there lessons we can learn for next time? I look at all the points above, and I can think of only two. One of them is that I need to remember -- for my own sake -- just how skittish and volatile my own emotions can be. (I assume you already know this better than you want to.) The other is that I need to find some kind of flag I can wave when it feels to me like you haven't heard me, or like you are answering something different from what I said, or something like that. If there are particular words I can use or ways to go about it, that would help. Maybe it would be enough for me just to say "Please slow down because I feel like you haven't heard me." I am sure that the times I most need to say it are the times I will be least willing to, because I'll already feel skittish or depressed, because I'll already be backing away into a wilderness. This is where courage comes in, and trust. I recognize that I need to exercise both those virtues more than I have. I'll try harder next time.

You end your letter by talking about our efforts to understand, forgive, and acknowledge each other, even going so far as to call them more important than ... time spent together. (I thought your use of ellipsis was very tasteful, by the way. smile) Thank you. I'm grateful you did. I hope what I have written here helps with the understanding. Somehow I can't think of this letter as the kind of "gift" you had in mind "for these long winter nights" ... some gift, huh? But maybe, even if it is hardly the kind of gift you thank Santa for, ... maybe it can help.

As for forgiveness, ... well on my side I am no longer mad, no longer upset, no longer raving in the wilderness. I no longer think about the situation in terms of accusation or blame. I hope that counts for something. Acknowledgement? Gosh, we are who we are. I can see how this flare-up grew directly out of us being who we are. In that sense, looking back on it, we shouldn't think it a surprise. But we can learn from it and do better next time.

As ever, we can always hope.

I love you, and we will see each other again. Please forgive me for not being stronger or trusting better: I'm working on it. And never give up, never despair, even if it all takes time. The best things always do.

All my love, unto ages of ages,
Hosea

I have no idea how she'll take this. But I do think I have to remember how mercurial my own emotions can be, and to factor that in as part of understanding our relationship together. Too often I think I present myself here as the consummate detached observer. But maybe it isn't quite so.