While I'm comparing Wife and Father ....

My post of a few hours ago about Father competing with Wife one Christmas was specifically intended to echo a post from some eight years ago about Wife competing with Brother. But it also reminds me that I have often felt there were significant similarities between Wife and Father. That's one reason why, once I was disentangled from Wife, I thought about using this blog in a slow and relaxed way to meditate on my relationship with my dad. If it worked to help me figure out one problematic relationship, maybe it could help with another. (As soon as I wrote that I started browsing through the blog to find where I say so. I'm sure I do somewhere, but my indexing isn't very good and I can't find it. I can find this post where I wonder if I still need to keep the blog at all; and by the time I got to this post I had already made that decision some time in the past. But I can't find where. Oh well.)

Here's one similarity that struck me some months ago. I jotted it down, and if I write it now I won't have to keep the note. Both of them think (thought) of people schematically, "putting them in boxes" as it were. 

I wrote about this with respect to my dad in this post here. (And actually, come to think of it, you can cross-reference this essay over on the Patio.) But Wife always used to do it too. (I suppose it is likely that she still does, but I don't have any recent data.) She listens to what someone tells her and then uses that to construct a two-dimensional picture of him or her that she then uses as the basis for her future interactions.

In fact this is one of the things that frustrated her the most when she first met my dad. My father was fond of floating ideas to see how people reacted, and sometimes he would introduce one with the words, "Well I always thought that ...." I grew up around him, so I knew that this meant "Here's something I just thought of." But Wife assumed it was a statement of deep religious principle, and was therefore puzzled and frustrated to hear him contradict it blandly the next time they talked. (I just did a search and found that I mentioned this same fact about their interaction in this post here. Maybe after a while everything I say is just repetition of one sort or another.)

Anyway, it's not a profound point. But it's definitely a similarity. One of many ways that maybe, in a weird karmic sense, they deserved each other. Given how famously they got along, that's a funny thought.