Dear Hosea,
So if D travelled to Faraway City with the specific intent of seeing you and doing all the things you two normally do on your "dates", and if you were sick-ish but not really sick but didn't feel like having sex (at all), how would she react?
Sincerely, Janeway
I had to think a bit about how to answer the question, but I ended up telling a story. It went something like this:
Hmmm …. Excellent question. She’d be disappointed, of course, and at some level more than a little put out after having taken the time and spent the money to travel several hundred miles to see me. I also hope that if I were feeling out of sorts even before we got together, I would have the good grace to let her know ahead of time.
But what would she actually do? Let me try to think of some real-life examples ....
There have been individual nights (or even a couple in a row) during our longer dates when I have retreated, quiet and uncommunicative, and kept to myself as we slept. Sometimes I have been disturbed by something concrete that we were later able to discuss and resolve; other times I have just shut down over something so trivial as to be (in effect) nothing, and these are the times D talks about when she says she has to learn to deal with my depression … and that she finds it a little scary. In the moment she often responds by backing away (which is exactly the wrong thing to do); but by the next morning she is more solicitous. On the other hand that has never lasted for an entire date.
Sometimes I just haven’t gotten it up (I blame advanced middle age) but have been more than willing to hold her, to caress her, and to make love in other ways. I gather that’s not what you are talking about.
Probably the closest we ever came to what you describe was once that I never wrote about, but which was kind of a postscript to our sixth date (the second big housecleaning epic). She had travelled a long way not only to see us but to visit several other family members up and down our state. So a few days after she had left, we were talking on the phone and she said her route was bringing her back through town. (She had done some visiting up north of us, and now was headed south of us.) How about if she stopped in town for an hour on her way, got a motel room, and we spent lunchtime together?
Honestly this made me very nervous. The date that had just finished, after all, was the one where we had all driven to visit my parents, and I discovered Wife had packed a revolver in with her toiletries. Admittedly I had confiscated the revolver but I was still very scared of being seen in our own town with D, when she had supposedly left over a week ago. Oh, and I had also just confiscated Wife’s wallet and driver’s license. (Besides all this, remember that my affair with D was less than a year old at that point, and it had only been a couple of months since Wife and I had stopped having sex ... see, e.g., this story from February.) I didn’t flatly say No on the phone, however; but as I thought it over later I chickened out and texted her not to come.
You know what’s coming … she didn’t pick up her text message. I was at the office about noon and she called me on her cell phone to say “I’m here!” and give me the location of the motel. My heart jumped into my throat and I stammered out something about hadn’t she checked her cell phone for messages? No, obviously not. I explained how I had chickened out, feeling like a complete heel. She replied, a little coldly, that of course we didn’t have to make love if I didn’t feel like it, but she still wanted to see me. Plotting her route from north to south through our town had meant driving some six hours out of her way as compared to the direct route, and she would hate to have done all that extra driving for nothing. We agreed to meet at a coffee shop near the motel.
When I got there I was still feeling scared. We sat outside in the sun (“Where we are more visible!” I kept thinking) with our coffee. I don’t remember saying anything, but just staring vacantly at the table or into the middle distance … occasionally looking helplessly at D. She for her part sat with me, watching me and stroking my hair. Maybe we talked a bit, I don’t remember. And then after a while we departed. I went back to the office, and she hit the road southbound to visit more relatives. [I allude to this visit in my remarks about sunlight and coffee towards the very end of this post.]
The thing is, D has talked about that time since then as the first time she really had to face my depression in full force. And in her recollection, what she describes is always the sun reflecting off my hair and her delight in being able to spend time with me, … even under conditions of such disappointment, even doing nothing at all. I have trouble thinking of the time in this light, because to me it is a memory of a colossal failure of nerve on my part, and of a time I disappointed her acutely. But she refuses to see it that way at all, at least to judge by what she tells me. She admits it is not what she expected or planned, but she insists that she is grateful for the time together anyway.
This is one respect in which D is not simply high maintenance. Her deep religious commitments have given her a capacity for gratitude, even when she doesn’t get what she wants. Sometimes I have to wonder if she is bullshitting me, when she talks about being grateful under conditions of acute disappointment. But I have come to conclude that it’s not exactly bullshit … it’s more like a personal discipline, that especially when she is acutely disappointed she forces herself to find something in the situation to be grateful for. And then she focusses all her attention on that. It means that her long-term evaluation of what has happened is not always the same as her immediate emotional reaction. It’s also not a program that I could imagine anyone else would follow ... or at any rate not that I could expect. Your mileage may vary.
[I also realize, as I am about to post this, that this very aspect of D's character is something for which I had better be extremely grateful, because it is like a "Get Out of Jail Free" card that has rescued me any number of times that I have screwed up with her.]
Does this come anywhere near answering your question, or have I shot completely wide of the mark?
All the best,
Hosea
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