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To Debbie, 03-29-2014
Dear Debbie:
I am writing this reply at the suggestion of my therapist. I have no intention of sending it – now or ever. But her idea is that it could be worthwhile to capture what I think today (she and I discussed this in our session a couple days ago), and then compare it with what I think in a few months. Will it be the same? Will it have changed? There’s no way to know except to wait and see.
Let me say right at the beginning, though, that I am immeasurably grateful that you sent me this letter. Some of our emotional discussions in the past have frustrated me because they seemed long on portent and short on data. I haven’t always known what exactly we were talking about. But this letter is clear and exact. I recognize perfectly the phenomena you describe, even though in several cases I understand them differently than you do. But at least I know exactly what we are talking about, and for this I am very grateful. So to begin ….
A couple of things I have noticed:
1. You seem to compartmentalize different parts of your life and keep them very separate. When one person strays from one part of your life into another, it seems to make you feel extremely anxious, even if you have planned the crossover and want it to happen. In general, you seem to put a lot of effort into planning, orchestrating and managing your life and events in it in order for things to go as smoothly as possible and to not have anything unexpected happen.
There are two points here: one about compartmentalization, and one about managing my life to make it smooth.
It is absolutely true that I compartmentalize different parts of my life, and that I’m good at it. What is not really true is the thought that this behavior has anything special to do with Wife, although I certainly deployed the skill to isolate Wife from other parts of my life when she began to become socially intolerable. But I had developed this skill long before I met her, probably in response to living with my father. (He even encouraged it – not in those words of course – when from time to time, as far back as grade school, he would encourage me not to let my friends at school know that he and my mother smoked pot.) Certainly by the time I was in high school I understood viscerally that I wanted my father to know nothing about my life at school, and I didn’t really want my friends at school to meet my family. School and home were different places; I was a different person in each; it took me time every day to morph from one person into the other (so that sometimes I dawdled quite a bit coming home, until I was really ready to be that person again); and so I didn’t want them to mix. And for the most part, they didn’t.
When I first got together with Wife, I was very much in love and wanted to integrate her into all the other parts of my life. I usually feel that way when I’m in love. My first rude shock on this front was our first year in graduate school, when we had several of my friends from my program over to our apartment for some kind of party or dinner and she started making a string of shockingly racist remarks about Mexicans. I had never known before that she was so racist. It shocked me, it shocked my friends, and I made sure never ever to repeat the experience.
Even so, when we left graduate school and I started working I wanted her to meet my friends from work: M, RC, and RH. And B, of course, because they were both witches. It didn’t occur to me to keep her separate from work. Even in the early days at the company where you and I first met [I mean my early days there, back in 1993] I was happy to have her come to company events. I always brought her to Christmas parties, to summer picnics, … everything. Ten years later, by the time the company shut down, I was less sanguine about it and brought her mostly out of habit or duty. At my current company I used to bring her to Christmas parties because I figured I had to, and then tried to spend much of the parties somewhere else. The last several years I just didn’t go. But all that was much later.
Anyway, my original point was just that this was a skill I learned as a kid living with my father, not as an adult living with Wife. I also tend to think of it as a useful skill. Isn’t this, in fact, what we want of people in the business environment? If you ask why your employee was late to work, do you really want to hear the details of his hangover, his fights with his wife, and that he had to bail his teenaged son out of jail? Or is it enough to hear that there were some unexpected issues that came up at home, but they were exceptions and won’t become the rule?
Do I become nervous when someone strays from one part of my life into another part? It depends. I was nervous having you visit me in my office a year ago, when I hadn’t moved out yet … when so far as the office knew, I was still peaceably married at home. But I expected to invite you to the recent Christmas party, except that it conflicted with our silent retreat. I was nervous about you meeting Son1 and Son2. But that’s because I had read so much about how you have to be careful introducing your children to your new girlfriend … and even my therapist said that the timing of the introduction was awfully soon. She asked, in fact, what was the rush? Why so early? And I was a little bit nervous having you meet my folks, just because I’m ill at ease around my father in general … with or without anybody else. I was worried how he would act around you, and I was trying to guess what he would say to me afterwards … or to anybody else. My father is a loose cannon, and everything about him makes me nervous.
The point is that most of these issues would have faded with time. As I say, I expected to take you to my Christmas party, and to dance with you there just the way we had danced at your Christmas party. I figured the boys would relax around you with time. And you showed yourself able to take my father admirably in stride. He still acted a little forced around you – the waiting for you to show up around Christmas got to be a real strain on everybody because my parents were both treating it as such a big deal – but again I figured that would wear off with time.
As for managing my life to make it smooth – I wonder about this. It’s true that a lot of my life has been uneventful and boring: I attribute this partly to the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, and partly to my excessive timidity. But I am trying to widen my circle, now that it’s just me. I went to Peru, for example. I’ve been going to more museums and so forth. I drove out to another state to spend the weekend with my relatives for my cousin’s wedding. OK, none of this is really adventurous, except maybe the trip to Peru. But I am trying to break out of the routines I have caged myself in.
Or maybe this is not what you meant. Maybe you meant the stuff above, about compartmentalization. But in that case, … where is the dividing line between over-managing my life (on the one hand) and striving for simple courtesy to guests or friends (on the other)? There probably is one, but I’m not sure where it is. In the case of trying to cushion my relationship with Son1 and Son2, if I haven’t already done too much damage, the reason there is simple: that relationship is more important to me than my relationship with you, or than my relationship with any other new romantic interest ever could be. Girlfriends, after all, come and go; but I hope to be connected to my sons as long as I and they are alive. The relationship will take different forms over the years, to be sure. But it is still primary.
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