Blast from the past: Wife meets Boyfriend 1 (B1, part 1)

Many years ago, when I first started this blog, I figured I would write a post sooner or later about Wife's involvement with Boyfriend 1. Someday.

Well, it's been fifteen years since I started the blog, and I haven't written it yet. How about if I start writing it tonight? I may not finish it all at once, but maybe it will take me less than another fifteen years to finish.

One other thing: the events in this story mostly happened 36 years ago. That's more than half my lifetime. It is inevitable that my memory will be a little foggy around the details. And if you ever hear the story from anyone else, it might sound different. This is what has stuck with me.

So … 36 years ago last summer, Wife and I had been married for two years, and had been in graduate school for two years. We had problems adjusting to married life. Each of us had unstated expectations that conflicted with the other's unstated expectations, and we weren't good at talking about these things. We were also really bad at communicating about sex, and the pressures of graduate school didn't give us a lot of space or freedom in which to get better at it. (One of our neighbors summarized the graduate school experience all too well by joking, "It's Saturday morning—time for sex!")

 

As classes ended at the beginning of summer, I was invited to a conference in Paris. Wife had no such invitation. (Another source of stress was Wife's seething jealousy of the academic opportunities that came my way seemingly effortlessly, so far as she could tell, while she had nothing similar on her side.) But it so happened that the dates for the conference in Paris overlapped the dates of that year's Pagan Spirit Gathering. Wife was already a Wiccan at that point, and an initiate of the 1734 tradition. So she decided that while I was in Paris, she was going to PSG.

When we both got back, our homecoming was … troubled. At first it was little things: she was mad that I hadn't written her from Paris, and so she had been in the apartment all alone for two days with no word from me. (In fact I wrote a postcard as soon as the plane reached the airport, but it hadn't arrived yet. It arrived that afternoon, and I showed it to her triumphantly.) Then we got to more chronic issues: she was mad that I spent so much time with my books, and not enough time on her. (Well yes, this was graduate school.) And finally she started talking about her time at PSG. She had gone to a number of rituals. She had wept over feeling so isolated in our marriage. (See the discussion of books, immediately above.) She had wept that she felt cut off from me because I wasn't a Pagan. (Even though for two years I had been acting as Priest for her in every Full Moon ritual she did, invoking the goddess Cerridwen into her in aspect!) In fact she'd wept over lots of things.

Back then we didn't know that Wife suffered from clinical depression. And I have always been a sucker for weeping women. So this prelude softened me up something good.

And finally she mentioned that she had met … well, this guy … who had been so kind and so understanding, and who had sat with her to dry her tears, and who had accompanied her to so many of the rituals. And, … well, … she wasn't sure she wanted to tell me the rest of the story.

Go on. Tell me the story.

Well one evening they went back to his tent, and he was holding her and comforting her, and they just lay there cuddling for hours. And finally she got so aroused and so frustrated that she couldn't stand to go on any longer. So she rolled him over, saying, "Look, I'm baby-proof these days, so let's finish this." And they fucked.

And then they spent the rest of PSG together, fucking.

It's a tribute to how well she had primed me emotionally, or to how far I was affected by her crying and by my own deep conviction of my existential failure in emotional relationships (cf., for example, all the backstory about Marie, especially here) that, when she told me she had finally broken down and fucked this guy, I cheered instead of hitting her.

Anyway, because of a whole bunch of other reasons, Wife was leaving graduate school that summer anyway to go home. I could join her if I wanted to. But this guy—that all of you know as "Boyfriend 1"—lived in the same state we did. If I followed her home, she wouldn't promise to stay with me because she might decide she liked him better. I had the summer to decide.

In the end I decided to follow her home, and left graduate school. But I didn't know how this business with Boyfriend 1 was going to work out.