Pretending to be better or worse

Sometime during the first couple of years of this blog, I remember reading a post by some other blogger who belonged to the same little community, where we all read and commented on each other's blogs. He wrote (or maybe it was "she," I forget), "It seems like some of the bloggers that I read are pretending online to be better people than they are in real life. And then it seems like there are others who actively pretend to be worse than they are in real life!"

I've always wondered if I belonged in either list. Maybe not, of course. It might be pure self-centeredness for me ever to imagine that I did. But if I were on one of the lists, which one?

I hope that other blogger had me slated for the second list. Because I know that I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about my weaknesses and failures. And yet, despite that, my neighbors are still wonderfully kind and I still have a couple of friends who think well of me—Debbie and Marie, for sure, but probably others too if I set my mind to it.

Why do I focus on my weaknesses and failures? Those are the things I need to process, if I am to live with them. Those are the things I have to learn from, if I am ever to improve. And those are the things that I don't discuss with other people, so I have to discuss them anonymously with you. I'd have a lot of trouble discussing these things viva voce in real life, so I have to talk about them somewhere. And this is the place.

Or maybe it's all just punishment for my sins, like I discuss here. That's always a possibility.

      

Who's out there?

Is anybody besides me reading any of this? 

Comment on this post and tell me something about yourself.

Of course there are trillions of websites on the Internet. (Is that even the right order of magnitude? I pulled it out of my ass. It could easily be too big or too small. Oh wait ... I just asked Google, who pointed me to the answer that as of January 2020 there were "over 1.74 billion websites of the Internet. So I guess I exaggerated.)

Anyway, there are a lot of websites on the Internet. The odds of anybody randomly stumbling across this one are correspondingly small. 

That was true when I first started this blog too, but back then I knew how to change it. I became a "comment whore." Back then I was struggling with my wife's chronic infidelity, so I commented on websites that offered support to the cheated-upon. I also started following some blogs by adulterers, to try to understand them from the inside (as it were). I left comments and plenty of linkbacks, and gradually people began to drop in and read what I had to say. Then I went private for several years, for a variety of reasons. Some people stayed with me, until in the natural course of time they slowly drifted away. The way everybody does.

Meanwhile I've gone public again, because the reasons that drove me private no longer obtained. But if anyone is reading today, they are keeping quiet.

And I no longer have a single, overarching theme. I write about whatever I'm thinking about. That makes it harder to play the "comment whore" game a second time, because there is no obvious place for me to go to leave my comments and trackbacks. Do I care? I don't know. Maybe this blog can just take the place of a journal, where -- as noted -- I can write down everything that happens to flit through my head. 

Or, well ... not everything, not with no filter at all. I still try to disguise my identity, so that I don't have to disguise what I think or say. (Oscar Wilde:  "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.") And I mostly try not to talk about politics, because that feels somehow sub-personal. Anything overtly philosophical gets posted on another site, which I refer to casually as "the Patio."

If I knew that I was in conversation with someone in particular, that might help me shape my thoughts. Or not. But it would be nice to know.
       

In case I die ....

Some day I should get around to writing a will. [Whenever anyone tells you "Some day I should" that is an exact synonym for "I will never in my life...."] But in the meantime at least I have written a letter to my boys that sits in the front of my filing cabinet that tells them things like where to find information about my insurance, etc., and how to get into my computer.

But I am torn when it comes to my two blogs (this one and the Patio). I already discussed this topic once here. But what do I do? I can tell them that the blogs exist, so at least they can read them. I don't know if there is a risk that BlogSpot might take them down if I go too long with no activity. But I don't want to give them the ability to delete it all while I'm alive. Hell, I'd just as soon they not be able to delete it after I die. Export, sure; delete, not so much.

Anyway, I was thinking about it today while updating that letter I mentioned. I try to update it once a year, just after Christmas, so you see I'm only half a year late. (sigh) What I settled for doing this time was just to list the two URLs down at the bottom of a page of people to notify in case I'm gone ... list them totally without comment. So maybe they are blogs I read? Or whatever. But then if the boys have any curiosity at all, it's easy enough to plug them into a browser to see what pops up. And I assume it will be pretty easy for them to figure out that it's me, once they start reading. The diary entries (especially the early ones) are often about events that included them. And then there's this. On the other hand I won't have made an overt statement, so if there's anything where plausible deniability is needed, maybe it's available in a stretch.

Or maybe I shouldn't be so damned subtle. Maybe I should spend less time communicating like Leo Strauss, for heaven's sake. It's not like anybody could ever tell what Strauss meant, either ....
        

How I write

It occurred to me a while ago that maybe I should say a couple of words about how I write ... not the mechanics, of course, but the style and the approach.

For the most part I don't think about it. I write these posts pretty much the way I write anything else. I have been told by some people that my written style is distinctive, and this actually worries me a bit. If anyone who knows me personally ever finds this blog by accident, I fear that it may be difficult for me to maintain my anonymity; I feel in this respect a little like the character Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, who does a piece of magic at one point when he is trying to stay hidden, and then says, "If there is any to see, then I at least am revealed to them. I have written Gandalf is here in signs that all can read from Rivendell to the mouths of Anduin."

But I don't know how to write differently -- or not significantly differently -- so I think I am stuck with this outcome.

There are, however, a couple of respects in which I write these posts differently than I would write anything else.

One is that I am less guarded in what I say. I don't mean simply that I talk about very personal things -- that is the point, after all. But I don't check myself the way I would in polite conversation. If the phrase that comes to mind as I write -- the phrase that truly captures what I mean -- is pungent or earthy, I don't strive to replace it with something anemic and inoffensive instead. After all, I figure, my grandmothers are both dead and nobody from our church will ever connect this with me. (I've never done any writing for our church.) So I don't have to worry about anybody being offended by my choice of words.

This feature of how I write these posts is especially visible in one particular instance, one that I find common enough it deserves mention by itself. This blog is about my marriage, and one of the features of married life is sex. Moreover, the blog is inter alia about how I try to deal with my wife's multiple infidelities, and those too (pretty obviously) involve sex. Now, the English language has lots and lots of phrases for describing sex: some are flowery, some are elegant, some are clinical, some are crude. The choice of which one you want to use depends on what atmosphere you want to convey, and also on who you want your reader to think that you are: if you want to sound refined, you use these terms; if you want to sound businesslike and direct, you use those ones.

Wading through all these terms -- through euphemisms piled on top of euphemisms, because one set of euphemisms becomes too common and therefore starts sounding crude so that it has to be replaced by another -- is a lot of work. And I decided early on in writing this blog that I wouldn't bother. At a fundamental level, they all mean the same thing, and I think it is therefore simpler to use the same word each time and let the context dictate what the mood or atmosphere is supposed to be. Therefore I made a deliberate choice to settle on the root word upon which all subsequent euphemisms and indirections and obfuscations have been piled. At least everybody will know what I mean.

The basic verb in English to refer to the act sometimes called "having sex" or "making love" is to fuck. Therefore you will find that all references to sex in this blog, when I need a verb or a participle, use some form of fuck or fucking. This is deliberately intended to avoid all the other complications through which I would otherwise have to wade. And, as I say, everybody will understand me.

I should add, if only as an afterthought, that one consequence of using fuck as a verb in this blog is that I will never use it as an interjection, nor as a piece of generic profanity. If I am trying to express exasperation or impatience or anger, there are lots of other words I can use. But any time that I use fuck it will be because I am trying to convey literal semantic content. I hope that mollifies anybody who finds himself perturbed about how very frequently I write it ...

Is it infidelity or polyamory?

If anybody ever reads this blog -- and maybe they won't -- I'm going to get a bunch of angry replies telling me that all of my wife's extramarital sexual experiences are by definition "infidelity"; and I'll get another bunch of angry replies holding up the allegedly good name of "polyamory" by quoting some exact definition that spells it all out. But I have to put this question front and center at the beginning because real life is not so tidy as anybody's definition, and because I really don't know the answer. That's part of why I'm writing this blog in the first place.

I guess (from what I see on their websites) that the first question the polyamorists would ask is what ground rules Wife and I set up about extramarital sex when we first got married. But we didn't really set up any. We talked about it a bit before the wedding, but we didn't really come to any kind of conclusion. We both said we couldn't imagine it happening. (Ah, young love!) When we sat down with the pastor who married us, to plan the service, he outright said that he didn't believe the line about "forsaking all others" should be in the vows because he certainly hadn't forsaken all others and he didn't expect anybody else to, either. (In retrospect, this guy was a real piece of work, but I didn't see it all so clearly at the time.) I had some idealistic notions lifted from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land that made me think objecting to extramarital sex was silly and irrational, and I probably said as much to Wife. I even read that book aloud to her over a couple of weeks -- how romantic! I do believe (though I can't remember for sure at this late date) that I said I would at least want to know if it ever happened.

Wife met Boyfriend 1 at the end of our second year of marriage, and for a variety of reasons fell into bed with him almost immediately. I was out of town that week, and when I came back she told me the first day, ... in the middle of a very long conversation about a whole bunch of other things too. It had been a really rough two years, and my immediate reaction was to be glad she'd had the confidence to tell me. But over the next year (which is about how long she was involved with Boyfriend 1) I found myself on a violent emotional roller coaster. Turns out that the ideas in Stranger are really interesting at an intellectual level ... but in actual practice, let's just say that your mileage may vary. It didn't help that Wife and I had plenty of other things to fight about during that time, too. I said the first two years were rough, but so were many of the others after that.

Next was Girlfriend 1. (Yes, you read that right.) I knew about her even before anything happened, because Wife told me she thought this girl was chasing her, and I -- having loose gravel for brains and therefore having learned nothing the first time around -- asked "Gosh, what if you let her catch you?" So again, everything was all above board, and you could even say that in a sense I encouraged the whole thing from the beginning. (I should add that Girlfriend 1 was really, really hot, which may have colored my thinking; she had, of course, less than no interest in me even though she had a monster-sized crush on Wife.)

I'm not going to go through all the rest of the history right now except to say that, after Girlfriend 1, I told Wife my emotions had been through the wringer and I didn't think I could handle any more of this. Wife seems to have taken this to mean "Please don't tell me about any more romances that you decide to have." So when she took up with Boyfriend 2, she was scrupulously careful to say nothing. When I figured it out any way and confronted her, she denied it hotly and on oath. It was probably eight years that she was with Boyfriend 2 before she finally admitted it; and by that time Boyfriend 3 was on the horizon and Boyfriend 4 shortly thereafter. She was a little easier about admitting them, because I lied and said that it didn't bother me as long as she told me what was going on. That's not really true, of course. The truth is that it bothers me, sometimes intensely; but even so it doesn't bother me nearly so much as having her hide the truth from me. But when I tried to explain the more complicated version first, the subtle distinction was lost on her. Finally I went with the other version instead. The irony is that I had to lie to her about my feelings to get her not to lie to me about her affairs.

Fast forward to the present. She still sees Boyfriend 2 every so often, supposedly to get his help in solving her computer problems. Boyfriend 3 dropped out of the picture almost immediately. Boyfriend 4 was a steady item for a couple of years, but moved out of town last spring. He dropped in to see us for Christmas, though, and left before I got home from work. Wife tells me "nothing happened". Anybody taking bets on how much time they spent trimming the tree?

The history is background -- it may be necessary for you to understand the setting. But it leaves me all confused. I look at this and try to figure out how I feel about any of it, and the fact is that I don't know! And trying to put definitions or labels on it leaves me just as confused. Is it infidelity or polyamory? Boyfriend 2 fits all the classic descriptions of infidelity: she skulked and hid, she lied through her teeth about it, there was zero openness and honesty ... the works. Girlfriend 1 was at the other end of the spectrum: we talked about it before anything "happened" and at an intellectual level I even gave my consent. (I was an idiot, but never mind that.) The others are all in some kind of nebulous middle ground: in all three cases (that's Boyfriends 1, 3, and 4) she told me only after fucking them and not before; but in all three cases she told me pretty soon after first fucking them (anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks), and in all three cases I didn't throw a fit or get mad or insist that she stop, ... and in all three cases she continued to fuck them after telling me until the relationships fell apart on their own. (Or didn't, depending on what the truth is with Boyfriend 4.)

My emotions are all confused. Looking at the same events on different days, I feel dramatically different things. And when I try to make sense of all the hubbub, I keep coming back to the same basic questions. Is the fact that I get upset a sufficient reason to say Wife is behaving badly? Or do I have to just suck it up and get over it? Should I have done anything differently? Should I have been more accepting? Or less? Is this OK, or not?

Is it infidelity or polyamory? And how can I tell the difference?

Setting the stage

Why am I writing this blog? After nigh on a quarter century, I still find myself confused by my marriage. But I have also learned that I can understand things better if I explain them to others. Maybe this will help.

During that time, my wife has had five affairs that I know about. I wouldn't be surprised by one or two more, but who's counting? Two of these affairs were with men she still sees ... at any rate socially, as friends. She tells me there is nothing more at this point, and maybe there isn't; but she has also said that plenty of times when there was, so what do I know?

I'm going to need to give these people names, but obviously I don't want to identify them too closely. So let me refer to her amours with numbers: Boyfriend 1, Girlfriend 1, Boyfriend 2, Boyfriend 3, and Boyfriend 4. Of these, she is still in touch with Boyfriends 2 and 4. The others are long gone, for one reason or another.

This background sets the stage, so that you have some idea what I'm talking about and who these people are. In the same spirit, I will refer to my wife as Wife, and our children as Son 1 and Son 2. I suppose I could make up names for all these people, but it would be way too much work to remember them. And there's no way I'm publishing their real names all over the Internet.

That said, I'll click "publish" and off we go ....