Rage

Just this morning something clicked for me, and I really don't like where it points. It's about my relationship with Marie.

Once upon a time I had a fantasy that I would post our emails online here, in which case I could just link to them. But that was too much work and I'm too lazy, so I never did it. All of which means that I have to pause now to give you some backstory.
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I. Last year, when Marie and I were first courting by e-mail, I explained that technically I am still married to Wife. I said the topic of marriage wasn't a big deal for me, by which I meant Debbie broke up with me because I wasn't going to divorce Wife and she didn't want to be involved long-term with a married man; but I don't see a problem with it because the marriage is just on paper at this point.

Marie, however, took me to mean, Marriage? Either way is fine. Sure, hell, why not? Then as the discussion progressed she realized that I have no intention of divorcing Wife, and that if Wife suddenly dropped dead I would have no intention of ever marrying anybody again. Been there. Done that. Got the bruises. No way.

Only it turns out (what I didn't understand at the time) that Marie had fantasized about marrying me ever since we knew each other in college. That she had always wanted to be Mrs. Tanatu. And that she figured now, in her fifties, was finally her chance to fulfill this lifelong ambition. Right up until I made it clear that it would never happen.

And Marie went ballistic. Thank God it was over e-mail and text messaging, but she said things that made me want to slap her. Or else cut her off permanently. Fine, I was overreacting too and I didn't do any of those things. I waited until I could be calm, and then called her and we discussed it patiently over the next week or so. Crisis averted.
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II. Another time the subject of sexually-transmitted diseases came up, and I said something which made her realize that I didn't worry too much about them. I haven't fucked that many women, and for the most part I think those women have been reasonable choosy about their partners. (Wife was becoming less choosy there at the end, but she and I had long since stopped fucking at that point.)

Now it's not like Marie herself had always been ultra-careful about condoms during her previous relationships. But she'd had only two male lovers in the 34 years since I had known her in college, each for a matter of weeks (well, maybe months). And she'd spent a lot of years in love with a woman who fucked other guys, but she and Marie seem to have gotten naked together maybe once or twice. So for all practical purposes, Marie had lived her adulthood celibate.

But she had these friends, see, who were a practicing non-monogamous couple and who explained to her the elaborate rules they had concocted to conduct their amours by. Anyone new had to provide a current medical test. All physical contact was mediated by latex until then. On and on the rules went. And so Marie somehow got the idea that this was normal. That everybody who ever fucks other people besides one single spouse follows the whole protocol. That any other behavior is by definition "high-risk".

So again, out of the blue she sent me this email that she was going to call her doctor right away to say that I was amazingly high-risk, and something something something. She went on, but I don't remember the rest. Again, I waited until I could be calm (which was a bit of an effort), then called her back and talked her down off her high horse. We both went to get STD tests. Mine came out completely clean, while hers showed positive for herpes. To be sure, my doctor said that was a meaningless result, because anybody who has ever had this or that kind of a cold will test positive for herpes. But Marie was a lot quieter on the subject after that. And we don't use condoms.
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III. Marie is very political (she's a left-wing Democrat) and so got very wrapped up in the 2016 election. She was one of the crowds of people who thought the world was going to end in a blaze of fire within 24 hours after the election was called for Donald Trump. And it turns out that her brother voted for Trump.

My point of view is that people have a lot of reasons for voting for whoever they vote for, and for the most part I try to stay out of other people's business. You will notice that I don't discuss politics very often on this blog, and I tend to assume that whichever party is in power will end up doing some things OK and will screw up others because that's pretty much been my experience. There are some people whose speeches I enjoy more than others, but there's a difference between being able to talk well and being able to govern well.

But Marie sent her brother a savage note demanding, "If I kill myself will that make America great enough for you?" She didn't tell me this. I heard it from her sister, who contacted me urgently asking if I thought Marie was genuinely suicidal. Their father blew his brains out when Marie was 12, so this family doesn't joke about suicide. So I called Marie, talked her into a calmer space, and then reported back to her family. And since then, her simmering hostility towards her brother (based pretty much entirely on his politics) has been unavoidably part of my business too.

Recently she told me that she had started to distrust her brother -- to think of him as an enemy -- ever since they were teenagers. She told me something about it and it seems that his biggest sin at the time was to stop playing with her and to play instead exclusively with his male friends. And I couldn't help thinking, ... ummm, ... isn't that kind of normal?
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IV. For the last few months we've had a long, lingering conversation about religion. Marie was brought up Catholic, spent a little time in her teens as a Born-Again, and then reacted violently against all religion by becoming a strident atheist.

Of course you know that my own point of view on religion is a lot vaguer than that, that I focus less on doctrine than on lived experience, and that I can feel something recognizable behind very different religious traditions. (See, for example, this post ... or just click on this filter.) And so we've been talking intellectually about the differences.

Until last Wednesday, when I sent her a note that included (among other things) the casual, flip remark that atheism is as much a matter of dogmatic faith as belief. I also called Richard Dawkins a Fundamentalist, and said that "trying to fight Scripture with geology is just as idiotic as ... [trying] to fight geology with Scripture."

And Marie lost her shit again. I won't quote from her reply. But I sent her an answer this morning saying that I was sorry for having hurt her, but that we also had to talk about her rage. What the fuck is going on? No other topic of conversation matters at this point.
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V. The thing that disturbs me -- to get finally back to the opening of this post -- is that I think I might know what it is. When I realized that her rage was sparked equally by the four incidents above (five if you count her experience with her younger brother in adolescence), I also realized that they could be reframed or restated as follows:

Marie fell into bouts of uncontrollable rage when:

1. I failed to comply with the script she had written for me as her future husband.
2. I failed to comply with the script she had assumed implicitly for me based on what her friends told her about how to protect against STDs.
3. Her brother expressed political opinions different from the ones that look right and obvious to her, and voted for a man she loathes.
4. Her brother ignored her as a teenager and went to play with other kids instead.
5. I denied her self-proclaimed identity as a follower of scientific empiricism, and insisted that her atheism is just as much a faith commitment as that of any Fundamentalist.

You know that I used to read The Last Psychiatrist blog. You know that I still read the archives. And his single biggest theme is Narcissism. What I've learned from TLP is that the five sentences above are all textbook tells for Narcissism.

Holy shit.

Not this again.

Memo: As TLP points out more than once, if all your relationships fail the same way (read: if all your girlfriends turn out to be narcissists to one degree or other -- and I still have to write how or to what extent that applies to D and [a lot less strongly] to Debbie), then the only common factor is you. The problem isn't the relationships, but You.

Why do I keep choosing these women?