But why?

Ever since Debbie left Wednesday night, I have been trying to figure out why.  Oh, I know what she told me: that I have psychological work to do to recover from my last relationship … in reality my last two, I suppose, if you want to count both Wife and D.  That as long as I am married to Wife, even if it is purely de jure, it will tie up my energy in ways that make me not fully available to her.  And that there are social norms against a single woman carrying on with a married man.

 

Now I’ve conceded that maybe I have neuroses that have to be addressed somehow.  I wish I knew what they were, but I can’t rule out the possibility.  As for my energy being tied up, … well, maybe that was Debbie’s experience when she divorced.  I think a certain amount of my energy will always be tied up with Wife regardless of our legal status, because we have children together.  But then Debbie still talks about her ex-husband too, and checks Facebook to see what he and his new wife have posted there recently.  She has made a point, several times, of telling me (unasked, more or less out of the blue) that the two of them seem to be a good match for each other because they both drink heavily, that of course she doesn’t disapprove because they don’t seem to be hurting anyone and it’s not her place to have an opinion about how much they drink, and that she has completely outgrown the uncomfortable space she used to live in where she felt that his drinking reflected on her.  And so on.  (There’s generally more.)  Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think my own energy is a lot more tied up with Wife than that.

 

And then there is this concern about social norms, which just sounds absurd to me.  Debbie said, “Well maybe you don’t get it, but other people do. When we met all your relatives a couple weekends ago, I’m sure they would all get it.”  But of course they all know that I’m still legally married to Wife, and they welcomed Debbie with open arms.  So I can’t help thinking that’s an excuse.

 

An excuse to cover what, though?  What made her so uncomfortable that she had to call it off?  I’ve spent some time remembering things Debbie said here and there over the past year, and I have two theories.

 

The weaker theory is that, … well, she’s currently living and going to school two hours away from here and she spends a lot of time socializing with the people in her program.  Maybe she’s interested in one of them and wants to get closer to him but figured she couldn’t as long as she was involved with me.  And so maybe she decided that either I was going to take clear steps to where I could be only hers, or else I wasn’t offering her enough for her to pass up this other guy.  She’s never said anything quite that clear, of course.  But I’ve listened carefully when she has talked about her friends in the program, and at different times it has sounded like she is getting pretty close to one or another.  And the first weekend she spent here after moving, she waited until Sunday night and then said we had to have a long talk about “exclusivity”.  Later she said that wasn’t what she had meant at all, that it had just come out badly because she was tired and confused.  But naturally I have to allow for the possibility that maybe “exclusivity” is exactly what was on her mind, and then later she just decided to backpedal and obfuscate.  Debbie has said that she can’t be involved with more than one person at a time.  So that’s one possibility.

 

The other theory – the one that I currently think is more interesting and more likely – is that she just found herself feeling too nervous in the relationship.  Several times when we were first getting together she said that our relationship – even before it was sexual – was bringing up a lot of strong emotions for her, and she had to back down because they frightened her.  She said that when she was growing up she learned to associate strong emotions with being unsafe: her dad drank, her parents were violent to each other, and she herself did recklessly unsafe things when she was in the grip of strong emotions.  Later on, she told me that for a while she had contemplated entering a nearby Buddhist monastery as a nun, because the communal lifestyle appealed to her so much.  She picked up this theme of communal lifestyle later when she said it bothered her that I wasn’t part of any of her other circles of friends … and then she expanded on this to say that she found it very comfortable to meet her social needs in community – in circles of friends, or (presumably) in a monastery – but that the sheer intensity of a head-on, one-on-one relationship made her very nervous. 

 

And do you remember back when I talked to her about the idea that we pick out people like our parents to marry?  She could easily identify that her ex-husband (to whom she was married for twenty-five cool and passionless years) was a lot like her mother: proactive, decisive, matter-of-fact, reliable, ethical, but emotionally cold with no spark of divine fire making his blood leap and his spirit soar.  She could pick out several other lovers who fit the same profile.  But she had a very hard time placing me until I pointed out that I – much like her first husband (with whom she stayed only a year or so) – came close to fitting the way she described her father: emotionally warm, even passionate, but also more likely to be passive.  Her father is the one who drank himself to death.  Her father is the one who would rage at her mother when he was drunk, prompting Debbie to hop out her bedroom window and run down the block to sleep at a friend’s house.  (To be fair, apparently Debbie’s mother held her own in fighting back; but this made the house an unsafe place to be, and Debbie blamed her father for it. After listening to enough of her stories, I think I can see how he got to that place – a few years ago I might have been headed that direction with Wife. But that’s a digression.) 

 

So I wonder if it was the very intensity of our love, accentuated by the long gaps between seeing each other, that finally scared her off?  It was less than two weeks ago, after all – when we got back from the weekend visiting my aunt and uncle, after I left her apartment to drive home – that she texted me, “Hi Hosea, will you please text me when you get home to let me know you arrived? I’m feeling the same gut-wrenching feeling of missing you that I feel when [my daughter] leaves after [we’ve had] several days together. Love you.”  Whatever you call that, it’s not indifference.  It may have been just too much turmoil.

 

It’s always dangerous trying to explain someone in terms that are very different from how she explains herself.  It means thinking that I understand her better than she understands herself (or at least better than she is willing to discuss), and that’s an arrogant thing to say.  Moreover there’s a huge posibility of self-delusion.  Maybe the truth is really just exactly what she said it was.  If I can’t bring myself to understand or believe it, maybe that’s just my problem.

 

Still, I can’t help but wonder.