Blast from the past: Boyfriend 1 aftermath (B1. part 3)

We never had another day as glorious as that first one. Wife continued to be married to me. (In fact, Boyfriend 1's older brother warned him, "If you love this woman encourage her to stay with her husband. Otherwise you will set up a pattern for her of leaving whenever things get tough.") But from time to time she continued to see Boyfriend 1. Sometimes he would visit us. Sometimes she would visit him. Mostly Wife was shy and embarrassed at letting one of us see her fucking the other one, so she tried hard to devolve the threesome into two twosomes. Ironically, this was the wrong choice on her part. What I found, speaking purely for myself, was this: 

If there was a closed door—or thirty miles of freeway—between me and some place that Wife was having sex, I felt insanely jealous. But if she was having sex with someone else right there directly in front of me, I felt fine because I figured that it would be my turn in a few minutes.

I don't know if anyone else in the world feels this way, but I bet they do. I assume I'm not so unusual as all that. But this means that, ironically, Wife's shyness and embarrassment led to maximal levels of jealousy on my part … and probably on his as well.

Blast from the past: Boyfriend 1 visits us (B1, part 2)

I told the beginning of this story yesterday, in this post here. (And, to some extent, in this post from two-and-a-half or almost-three years ago.)

So Wife and I left graduate school, and moved home. We found an apartment. Wife found a well-paying legal secretarial job, got fired, found a second legal secretarial job, got fired, and finally in November found a teaching job that she kept for the next three school years. Somewhere in those first few months I found a job as well. (It was after she found her first job, but before she got the teaching job.)

Boyfriend 1 lived in the same state, but some considerable distance away. Wife had gone to visit him for a weekend earlier in the summer, before I moved back with our stuff and before she had secured an apartment for us. (She was living with my parents at the time, and my father was pretty sure she was fucking someone else. Wife was never nearly as good at secrecy as she prided herself on.) After we were settled … I forget. Did she spend a weekend with him? Possibly not … her job situation kept her pretty well occupied for a while, and not in the fun sense.

But sometime in those first few months, Boyfriend 1 finally made the trip to visit us.

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!")

"You're stuck in a room ...."

I found the following post on Twitter:

Uno, dos, tres, ... part 6

My next installment was somewhat longer and a bit steamier.

Good morning, my love!

It’s amazing how much laundry I’d built up. No choice but to wash it today. So now I have half an hour to write you, while the machines run. I also really need a haircut.

[Two memos added much later. First, this took longer than half an hour. Second, this whole email comes with a serious NSFW warning. If you are reading it at work now, just close the email and save it for later.]

First, to fold your other email into this one, yes Girlfriend 1 actually thanked me timidly, early on, for sharing Wife with her. Now after a year or two had passed (Wife said that) she was encouraging Wife to leave our town and me, and to come to the Bay to live with her. But I chalk that up to passion, plus two years at college listening to other people’s coming-out stories and weaving a romantic fantasy of her own. Perhaps I flatter myself and she actually thought me an ogre, who knows? I tried to be a gentleman, but Eros can distort the best of intentions all to hell. The only way to know for sure would be to ask her, I guess, which would first mean finding her .... Maybe not my most practical suggestion.

I don’t know if Girlfriend 1 learned anything from watching me about what to do in bed with Wife. I don’t remember overtly teaching her anything. On the other hand, I do remember that first morning, after we had all been cuddling for a while and it was getting pretty steamy but nobody was admitting it yet, I surreptitiously slid my hand under the covers and up Wife’s nightshirt to verify that she was, as I guessed, wet. She was sopping. So then in a few minutes, as slowly and gently as I could, I pulled back the covers and then took Girlfriend 1’s hand and guided it up Wife’s thigh. There was not the slightest resistance from Girlfriend 1, which told me loud and clear that this was fine with her and she had only been waiting for permission. And when I got her hand all the way up I pushed her fingers into Wife’s squishy-soggy vulva. Wife giggled nervously and asked, “Are you shocked?” I don’t remember any answer from Girlfriend 1; but when I removed my hand, she didn’t remove hers.

Afterwards in private Wife berated me for pushing things to become sexual so fast. But I would have sworn — and would still swear in court today — that all I was doing was to make open what each of us already really, really wanted. (Feel free to add your favorite joke here using the phrase “make open”.) 

Here’s the TLP link. It’s clear that he is thinking specifically of MFF threesomes; also that he assumed his archetypal reader is a guy. Most of the article is about something else, or rather a hundred things (as is typical for TLP). https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/06/amy_schumer_offers_you_a_look.html

Hot and also very tender ... yes, that’s an excellent description of the Girlfriend 1 Story. Of course it had its sad parts too, and of course it ended... in fact I think it ended with Girlfriend 1 not wanting to see Wife any more ever again, though that might be creative embellishment by my subconscious. But “hot and very tender” is how I remember it in a nutshell.

Thank you for clarifying that by “jealous” you meant “envious”. I get it now. And yes, that probably would have suited you well. (One of Wife’s reasons for repeatedly pushing me away from Girlfriend 1 was, “She’s young and virginal, she needs to go slower” — where slower seemed to mean “me but not you” because it never changed over years. And slower would have suited you just fine ... as would the sight of Flora coming to your rescue, I imagine.) I will add that from the guy’s point of view that configuration is less than totally satisfactory. But that wasn’t the question.

But also, ... that really was early! If it was before [the boyfriend you mentioned], ... um, gosh, had you been in bed with anyone before Flora and after me? Because going straight from our time in bed to something as complex as another woman and then a threesome ... oh, my sweet, innocent little lamb. Oh heavens!

May I suggest (as you already know) that you really got things out of order in the early years of your sexual history? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to think what changes one could make with the ability to send what you know now back in time? (I guarantee my undergraduate years would change a lot if I could do that!)

Interesting that you’ve assumed that any Third Person would have to be a woman. Now of course I’d be thrilled with a woman, don’t get me wrong. I’ve always loved women. But I recognize that for you the stakes would be a lot higher with a woman. I suggest that three criteria, at a minimum, would have to be met.

First, she would have to be someone you trusted. 

Second, she would have to be someone you lusted after. “Finding her attractive” would not be enough, because it can mean so many things. I mean a woman who made your heart beat faster, and your nipples stand erect straining against your T-shirt.

Third — and maybe this is a corollary of the second — she would have to be someone whose enthusiasm you found urgently and overpoweringly contagious in case I had occasion to play her like a violin. The point here is that you’d have less chance to feel jealous if you were also feeling really horny. Or rather, more exactly, the jealousy and insecurity would generate emotional fuel that would be taken over by the overpowering lust ... so that you would feel every spasm vicariously, voraciously, and so that when it was your turn right after you would launch into orbit.

You could hold her or even kiss her while I was attending to her other end, if it would help the contagion. I don’t need a lot of room in which to work. 

I think these criteria are not impossible, but they certainly set the bar very high. On the other hand, they might encourage you to keep your eyes open.

Ooh, ooh — apropos of very little, but I had an idea at the laundromat. Let me pass this on to you as, ... umm, as a compelling image or storyline. Let me know if it shows promise.

You remember that man with the nefarious plan to twist a woman’s feelings by subjecting her to inescapable ecstasy? What would it be like if you had a job as his lab assistant, and he assigned you the task of running the machinery, or administering the medicine, or whatever it was? “You’re a woman, so you’ll know exactly where to hook up the electrodes to have the most devastating impact.” In this story you took the job in all innocence — and let’s assume that you really needed the job so you couldn’t afford to walk out when you learned of his darker plans. But now he’s making you administer the treatment to his subject or even subjects — not just to attach the electrodes or inject her with the serum and then walk away, but to stay there for the whole operation: twist the dials if it’s a machine, closely monitor her reactions to the medicine if it’s a serum, jot down on a clipboard exactly what she does and exactly when she does it, all the way through to the end. You’d have to pay close attention throughout. You couldn’t let anything go unnoticed out of delicacy because “We’re all scientists here.” You’d have to stick with the operation straight through to the end. And what would that be like? How dispassionate could you remain in this job that demands total passionlessness, while the subject(s) is/are experiencing limitless passion?

Of course the spin that it adds to the normal story is the change in your role. You still have no real agency — you need the job and so you have to do whatever he says — and yet you are at the more operational end, rather than the victim. Let me know what you think.

Or maybe you thought up this variant years ago, and were just too embarrassed to say anything.

Ahem. Where was I?

Oh right. Threesomes. 

On the other hand, looking at the option where the Other Person is a man ... I’m surprised that never consciously occurred to you. I distinctly remember more than once whispering exactly that fantasy into your ears while you were giddy and incoherent. So it’s funny that you never remembered it for private use later — that’s certainly how I hoped you’d use it! Filling out your repertoire of fantasies was part of my motivation, along with just looking for sounds to accompany your sensations and thinking you might have gotten bored of growls or of “Yes, yes, more, more.” It gives me a way to fuck you even when we are apart.

Anyway, yes I assume you could find a Second Man very agreeable. And that configuration takes advantage of women’s naturally greater endurance — not just for any physical exercise but specifically for sex. Once a guy has come, he’s going to be limp for a while in the best of cases. But at the same time that he’s (temporarily) losing interest, he has just made the girl’s insides even wetter, and she’s usually perfectly ready to keep going. If both men are young and energetic, the first one might even recover in only a little more time than it takes the second one to come in his turn, which means the party can go on (alternating men) quite a while. Once — only once, I’m sorry to say — Wife and Boyfriend 1 and I spent a very agreeable Saturday that way. We needed slightly longer to recover than the other guy took, so we used her vibrator in between. Pity I’m so much older now ....

But look for a guy that I can talk to and make friends with, if possible. Or, ... well, ... I always wanted that in the past, partly because it was so very hard for me to talk about sex and I wanted to be able to talk with the other guy about what we were doing to/for Wife. Also I wanted to be friends rather than rivals. But I can talk about sex better now than I could back then, and I’m less worried about rivalry. In any event it would be nice if he were a good guy. Fortunately it is likely that any guy who met enough of your criteria would meet a lot of mine.

Now I’m going to go get that haircut.


Loving you ever, with body and heart and mind and spirit,

Your Hosea

Uno, dos, tres, ... part 4

And I in turn replied like this:

“Weirded out by what you were feeling and saying”? Well yes, it is unconventional territory. That doesn’t mean it has to stay weird. Eating snails sounds weird until you spell it escargot.

But let me ask: did your final letter from this morning include all the weird stuff, or is some of it still shoved under the bed?

Also, “35 years ago”? As in 1982? I knew it was a long time but I was guessing close to a decade later. Oops. But even so 1982 sounds really early.

So, you ask a bunch of questions and then you say things that make me want to ask you questions in turn. Which do I address first? I suppose I’ll try answering your questions, pretty much in the order you ask them.

Why did Wife keep replicating the threesome configuration if she didn’t like it? The first one just kinda happened, and I think she hoped that it would keep each of us (Boyfriend 1 and me) from being jealous of the other. And it helped but it didn’t really work. Also it is possible that she thought, “Oh wow, this is cool. I’ve never done this before,” kind of like you saying it’s good to be able to look back on something exotic in your misspent youth. (BTW, The Last Psychiatrist has a great bit on the phrase “it just happened”. He says that girls always describe threesomes this way, and guys never. He says the only times a guy will say “I dunno, it just happened” are if he’s talking to his girlfriend and just cheated on her, or if he’s talking to the police and holding a head.)

With Girlfriend 1, ... it’s hard to remember for sure this far back, but I think that may have been how she first got Girlfriend 1 into bed. Wait, let me explain. That is, Girlfriend 1 had been in love with Wife while her student; after graduation, Wife invited her to visit our apartment for a weekend; Girlfriend 1 slept on the sofa but came in to say Hi one morning, sat on the bed and started to caress Wife’s hair, and it went from there. (I am certain I have telescoped the real course of events by a whole huge lot.) After that, my sense is that Wife didn’t really want Girlfriend 1 and me in the same bed; but a precedent had been set, and of course I wanted Girlfriend 1 there (hope springs eternal), and it was a small apartment. I don’t know what Girlfriend 1’s own preferences were. (Wife told me plenty about what Girlfriend 1 allegedly wanted, but I no longer trust anything she said on that score, though I did believe it all at the time.) I do know Girlfriend 1 and I exchanged Christmas presents for a couple of years. I have at least two books that were gifts from her. So if she wanted me to outright vanish she hid it well. That still leaves a lot of other choices. It is likely that she didn’t want sex with me, though I do not guarantee that she would have been forever unpersuadable. In the event, though, it never happened.

Boyfriend 4 was more than a decade later, and he and Wife talked it out first. I think she brought it up (not he) but I don’t remember why. She said privately, months later, that the only time she came with Boyfriend 4 was when I was there helping too, but that might have been a lie to make me feel better.

Apparently part of what Boyfriend 4 said when she suggested it was, “Well OK, Hosea’s not bad looking.” So it is possible that Boyfriend 4 was expecting some action between him and me. I’m sure (on theoretical grounds at any rate) that my programming on that front is at least partly social and not 100% biological, but I’m also certain it would take a highly controlled lab environment to even think about changing it at this point. So we didn’t. And after a short while Boyfriend 4 called it off.

Rereading your letter, I think the foregoing addresses most of your questions. That is, you ask a lot but circling around the same topics. Let me know what I missed.

As for the questions from my side, ... well it’s mostly that you say a lot of different things about how you felt, and I want to make sure I understand you right. So mostly I’m going to ask, “Did you really say X and did you really say Y?”

First, it sounds like you say that you felt self-conscious being watched — which I think means, you felt self-conscious having Flora watch while you were fucking D. Is that right?

If yes, that’s no surprise the first time it happens. I don’t know if it makes it better or worse to remember that you were also hoping to watch D fuck Flora. And you sound a little embarrassed when you write even that, but of course you shouldn’t. It can be enjoyable to watch other people fuck. Admittedly that’s why there’s a porn industry, but I’m not talking about porn. I’m talking about people you know and (hopefully!) care about — and at that point I think the dynamic is not pornographic or prurient but something else. Something deeply caring, even loving. And if you can watch lovingly while others fuck (assuming you love at least one of them), then in the same way it can be just as loving for one who loves you to watch you fuck. “On display” is when you’re on a stage, under a spotlight, showing off for strangers. But in a warm bed at home, basking in the love of Flora while enjoying physical closeness with somebody else ... it’s not the same thing. Of course it’s way too late to tell you that now, and yes I remember that you said in retrospect you didn’t enjoy it so much. But remember it if it ever happens again. (As for enjoyment, there’s a quote out on the Internet. I thought it was from Billy Crystal, but Google turns up names like Mel Brooks or Sharon Stone. “Sex is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, it’s pretty good.”)

You talk about jealousy, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean, because right away in the same paragraph you say you would have liked Girlfriend 1’s role. But wait. Jealousy is when you don’t want your Beloved fucking someone else. But in Girlfriend 1’s role that’s exactly what you would have gotten: Flora would have fucked D in front of you. If you were jealous, wouldn’t that have been a problem for you? Or is “jealousy” really the right word?

In that setup Wife’s role was the one position that should have felt no jealousy at all, because neither of her lovers was with anybody else besides her. But you say you would have hated being the vertex of that angle. I will add that whoever is at the vertex in that setup gets the most sex, because she gets twice what anybody else gets. That wouldn’t have been your main motive of course, but FWIW.

So think if there’s a better word than “jealousy” for what you mean....

“Join in timidly” — I have to smile. Sweetheart, when there are only three people in bed there’s no place to hide. And for the most part people don’t expect to find timid virgins in threesomes. (I include spiritual virgins, ignoring the hymen for now.) So yeah, they would have had every reason to expect you to be bolder and more sexually aggressive than you say you were ... also at least potentially interested in experiencing the new person, whoever that was. You weren’t, but I think it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for them to think you might be .... 

Oh well. Live and learn. Trust me, every single time I was in bed with two other people it was awkward too, for one reason or another. It ain’t easy. Anyone who says otherwise has never tried it and is just extrapolating from having watched a lot of porn.

I hope this works as the next step in the discussion. Do let me know what your next questions are, and how weird you feel now.


Loving you ever, intellectually and carnally and every way in between,

Your Hosea

Uno, dos, tres, ... part 2

I replied to Marie's letter as follows:

Just home from the grocery store. I’ve been having troubles with my phone today because it will no longer download work emails. This means I’ve been over to IT a lot, which in turn means I’ve been shoveling your recent messages out of my Inbox and into a folder as fast as I can read them ... just in case his finger slips and he opens the home email folder instead of the work one. I know that if you work in IT you have to be immune to shock because you see everything. But maybe not while I’m standing there.

Thank you for this letter, though. You had alluded to the event before, but never really talked through the details and motivations, and it was really interesting. My only direct comment is that I absolutely 100% agree with your conclusion in the last paragraph. My own experience supports it, though in different ways.

So I’ve been in three different threesomes, each one with Wife and one of her amours. (This doesn’t mean three solitary events, but three casts of characters. In each configuration there might have been a small handful of events.) The third parties were, respectively, Boyfriend 1 (1986+), Girlfriend 1 (1990-1992 or maybe later), and Boyfriend 4 (maybe 2005?). Anyway, the details of particular encounters varied one to another, but a key part of the dynamic in all three cases is that Wife kept striving to decompose each threesome into two twosomes. Partly I think this is because it really, really bothered her to be watched, even by someone she was fucking. So if one of us was fucking her and the other was hanging out — kissing, caressing, or just waiting — she felt on display. And she kept coming up with excuses why “just tonight” she could be alone with the other person. (I forget if she ever offered to be alone with me, but of course I’d be there after the other person was gone.)

The problem is that what I found when I examined my own feelings was that if she was fucking someone else and I was locked out, it made me absolutely crazy with jealousy. You don’t want to see me like that, because it’s not a good time for anybody. But if she was fucking someone else and I could be part of the experience, my jealousy receded. When the Other was a guy, I was prepared to make the experience a mutual project for both of us to gratify Wife as much as possible. When the Other was Girlfriend 1 ... well, she was young and very pretty so I had a variety of totally unoriginal hopes; but Wife was fanatically possessive of Girlfriend 1, so those hopes were pretty much all frustrated. (“Look but don’t touch.”) (deep self-pitying sigh) 

And these experiences lead me to conclude, with you, that a threesome can work only if all three of you want it. If someone is actively trying to subvert it, the dynamic is all wrong.

So we agree, even though the particular details were a little different.

Loving you ever, in all ways (or from all ends),

Your Hosea

Pamela's threesome

OK, this article is more than three years old, but I only found it this week ... while looking up the link to past into the post where I reference Pamela Druckerman's book on infidelity.  Anyway, it turns out that Pamela Druckerman has quite a few articles available on the Internet.  Including one about how she planned a threesome for her husband's fortieth birthday.

Here's the link: http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/advice/a4307/threesome-sex-menage-a-trois-planning/ 

Mostly I mention it because the article is just a lot of fun.  The author pokes fun at herself in a friendly way while talking about how she looked for another woman to go to bed with her and her husband.  But she also mentions a couple of things she discovered once they were all in bed together.  It so happens these are things I discovered too, when in bed with Wife and (on different occasions) Boyfriend 1 or Boyfriend 4.  They are also things I don't normally think of when I mention these events, because usually my focus is just on how a threesome doesn't have to be all bad even if you are one of the Two and not the One.  Anyway, here are two things she noticed:

1. Sex can actually take a long time, and if you aren't actively engaged you can get kind of bored. Maybe if you're quiet you can sneak away to make a sandwich, or check your e-mail? Maybe the other two won't notice?
   
2. I never had the slightest sexual interest in Boyfriend 1 or Boyfriend 4. In both cases the "threesome" was really two concurrent pairs, both involving Wife. And Pamela said she found something similar as well: she had been expecting the other woman to be kind of interesting to her, and found that ... gosh, she really wasn't. Ho hum. Oh well.

Mostly, though, I just thought the article was fun.  If you haven't read it yet, maybe you will too.

Lessons learned

Yesterday I posted some fragments of a journal that I kept very briefly back in 1987, and I paged through a lot more of it figuring out what to post.  When I decided to drag it out, I remembered it as mostly an itemization of the things Wife did that made me so frustrated; and I figured it would be interesting to see how many of them continued into more recent times.  What I found is that I spent a lot more time talking about myself (too bad blogging technology hadn't been invented yet!) and trying to sort through my own thoughts and feelings.  But this meant I had an opportunity to compare how I thought then to how I think now.  Have I learned anything?  Do I do anything different?  Or has the time just been one long dreary round of repetition, a maze where I never find the cheese?

I think I see a few things I've learned.  There may be more.  And of course there are probably things I should have learned but haven't ... but that's a different post.  So, in no particular order, here's a list:

• Back then I tried to guess what Wife meant and what she wanted by listening to her tone of voice and interpolating ... reading between the lines.  Now I'm more likely to ask.
• Back then I tried to give the answer I thought she wanted to hear, which of course made it important to read between the lines so I could figure out what she wanted but wasn't saying.  Now I'm less likely to do that and more likely to give a straight-up answer.
• Back then I would not -- seemingly could not! -- talk openly about sensitive emotional issues.  Or sex.  All I could do was hint at what I meant in elegant, roundabout ways.  It's no surprise that the other person (typically Wife) never understood what I meant.  I've gotten better about this, but not what I would call good.  That is to say, I'm blunt enough with you, and that's a benefit because it gives me practice saying what I mean so that I can say it to other people ... people I talk to in person.  But a few days ago I looked back at some e-mails I exchanged with Debbie back in September -- maybe half a year ago -- where she was bringing up some of the very same issues she brought up when she broke it off.  And my replies had the same brittle elegance about them.  I got to the point after a while, but I should have rewritten them before hitting "Send" to take out the first few paragraphs and go straight to the meat of the subject.  And in four years with D, I never told her most of what I thought about the things she did and said.
• Back then I tried to solve Wife's problems, rather than letting her solve them herself.  I am a lot better at this now.  I realize that I have enough trouble solving my own problems [wan smile] that the last thing I need is to take on others as well.
• Back then I was tied up in knots from not knowing what I wanted in even simple, mundane situations.  Wife used to needle me by saying, "Chocolate or vanilla, Hosea, pick one."  I look at the very same dilemmas now, or ones just like them, and I think "How is it even possible not to know what you want here? How is it possible not to know what you like and value?"  To me nowadays, making those kinds of decisions seems a lot easier ... something like breathing.  The explanation is that back then I was afraid of what I wanted.  Part of the reason I dithered for so many years about Wife's infidelities is that one part of me wanted her to be a free-loving free spirit, because I felt my own life to be too pinched, narrow, and constrained.  I wanted her to be a breath of fresh air.  But at the same time I knew from experience (She started fucking Boyfriend 1 a scant two years after we were married.) that dealing with the emotional turbulence of an affair was painful, and I knew I was too shy and fearful to reciprocate by finding a girlfriend of my own.  (I had been married twenty-four years before I started the affair with D.)  Anyway, the point is that I knew what I wanted but I was afraid of getting it, and afraid even of admitting it to myself.  So I took refuge in telling myself that these situations were "complicated" (they weren't) and in hiding behind a wall of words.
            There's one irony in my bringing up the whole question of not knowing what I want ... namely that in career-planning I still have the same basic problem.  I believe the root cause to be different, however.  I believe that in the case of career-planning the issue is that I can identify things I like doing and things I don't like doing, but I can't figure out how to piece together a dream job that's any different from the lackluster job I have now.  Also I figure that if I were actually to change careers, it would mean making a lot less money, which in turn means I should wait another six years until Son 2 is out of college.  And by then I'll be 59 years old.  Hmmm.  Maybe the problem is partly a lack of courage, but I'm going to keep telling myself it's a lack of imagination.  You remember that line I quoted recently from the movie The Big Chill?  "Rationalizations are more important than sex ...." 
• Back then I spent a lot of energy worrying about Who I Was.  You know ... my identity, my Self, my True Will, my destiny ... all that happy horseshit.  I wrote, several times, of working hard to kill off my Old Self (the Identity I had developed growing up, and deployed all through college and graduate school); and I fretted over what New Self would take his place.  This is related to the point I just made above, about wanting Wife precisely because she was so different from me, so that by being married to her I could be forced to change instead of settling into a rut.  I don't spend my energy on that kind of worry any more, or not much.  I suppose I haven't completely gotten over it -- I'm thinking of deeply embarrassing posts like this two-part one here and here.  But I think these days that's the exception and not the rule.  At least consciously I think I'm more likely to say that it's not very helpful to think about my Identity or Destiny, ... maybe it's more practical just to think about the choices I happen to make today, and later on the choices I happen to make tomorrow.  (Compare the argument here.)  In my more metaphysical moods, I can even argue that the Self or the Identity don't exist at all.  But I sure did worry about this sort of thing years ago.
• Back then I thought it really mattered what perfect strangers thought about me.  I had forgotten all about it, but apparently Wife had talked about going to Pagan Spirit Gathering some time around then, and had suggested I come with her.  (You remember that back then she was Wiccan, right?)  And it seems I had a huge amount of anxiety about this.  Part of it was related to the free-love atmosphere of the place: it had been at an earlier Pagan Spirit gathering that she met Boyfriend 1.  But part of it was wrapped around mental pictures of myself there, feeling that I had to explain to everyone that I wasn't really a Pagan but I was there because my wife was, and at the same time realizing perfectly well how really dorky that would have sounded.  And honestly, in real life, who the hell could possibly have cared?  Last year I joined Debbie on at least three Buddhist retreats without ever once feeling I had to explain to anybody that I'm not a Buddhist.  (And in reality I'm not sure I can tell whether I'm a Buddhist or not.)  So maybe I've made a little progress on that front.         

Time to sign off.  Maybe I'll think of more later. 

Sixteenth date

Only a month after our last date, D and I met again, in International City. Two days, three nights, all over the weekend before my actual work started. Naturally Wife wondered why I had to be gone so long, and I tried to suggest that spending the weekend there would help me get over jet lag. Uh huh. I think this excuse is getting weaker and weaker, even though it turns out to be true.

Much of this date was like many of our others: we went to museums, we walked around, we discovered new restaurants, we talked endlessly, we fucked. So far, so good. Let me try to identify a couple of the points that were maybe a little different from the normal round.

D asked me if I had made any decisions on the question I described here. First I explained that Son 2 will definitely be attending the class at the Shakespeare Festival; then that Wife has said that as long as our finances are separated, she can't afford to go. D asked if I plan to pay for Wife to go there, and I said I hadn't decided yet. Then she asked if I had asked Wife about D herself also attending.

I fumbled a bit and then told her that I had asked the advice of some friends (that would be you) and had gotten several people all saying exactly the same thing, namely that it was a really bad idea. Why hadn't I told her before now? She proposed the theory that I had in fact already decided to pay Wife's way so we could make a lovely family event of it, and that I was being dishonest with her by not owning up. I tried to explain that no, I really haven't thought about it yet; I suggested that cowardice and dithering are better explanations for the delay. Well then, why at least didn't I tell her that all my friends thought it was a bad idea for her to join us there? After all, she added, she too had thought it was a bad idea (not that she said this at the time), so what was the big deal? Good question, I guess. We bickered about this for longer than we should have.

D also added that I have to assume Wife has been denigrating both of us to the boys consistently enough that I probably can't reveal the relationship right after separation, because her image will have been poisoned in their minds. She said I had better be prepared for it to be years, until the boys are older and can look at everything with different eyes ... and that our relationship will have to remain a clandestine affair till then.

In the process of bickering about this subject, as I explained myself by emphasizing my cowardice and indolence, I mentioned that when I sit down to write about what is going on in my life (meaning here) I often emphasize those parts of my character that are least admirable, as if I were setting out to look my worst instead of my best. I just tossed off the remark with an "Isn't that silly?"

D: Well, obviously you need a father confessor. You should look for a Jesuit.

Hosea: Yeah, right.

D: I'm serious. In fact there is a retreat house not too far from where you live, staffed by Jesuits. I looked it up to see if I might come out there some time, before ruling out any visits to your area. [She smiled.]

Hosea: Oh good. I can just see starting that conversation off. 'Father, there is this married woman I'm involved with, and I'm not treating her very well. How can I do better?'

D: And what do you suppose is the single most common thing they hear about in the confessional?

Hosea: I have no idea.

D: Infidelity. You're not going to shock anybody.

Hosea: Maybe not. But isn't there kind of a difference between 'not being shocked' and 'aiding and abetting'? I'd be looking for someone who didn't mind aiding and abetting our affair, after all.

D: That's why it has to be a Jesuit. They are uniquely good at ... ummm ... understanding how to engage with the World.

O-kay-y-y ....

Our last evening we went out drinking at a jazz club. Plenty of wine, lots of fun. Somewhere in the course of the evening I mentioned that if you handle it just right a MFM V-shaped triple can work out well enough, especially for the woman in the middle. Then I had to explain how I knew this (ancient history, back in the days of Boyfriend 1 and, later, Boyfriend 4) and D got very thoughtful. For a while she seemed concerned, as if sex with her (as just one person) might somehow be too boring for me. (As if sex with someone as passionate as D could ever be boring!) But I also think it set her to pondering. When we got back to the hotel, and had taken our clothes off, and were deeply enmeshed in each other, she suddenly said, "Open the door."

Huh?

"Open the door."

So I did. The hotel was silent, because it was so late. We didn't have an audience. And we wound up as passionately as ever. But later D simply said, "If I'm going to have to hide our love for years and years, until your boys grow up, then tonight I was prepared to show it off to anybody that walked by." Of course we are abroad here, so they would all have been strangers. And in any event nobody walked by.

But I have thought about that night a lot ever since then.

Promiscuous but choosy

One of the difficulties that Ryan and Jetha encountered in writing Sex at Dawn was the lack of a suitable word in English to describe the sexual attitude that they claim to have found in prehistoric times. What they settle on (somewhat reluctantly) is the word promiscuous. But they explain that it is not really suitable as normally used, because it implies undiscriminating sexuality. By contrast, what they wanted was a word that meant indefinitely plural but nonetheless choosy sexuality. And they couldn't find one.

If you think about it, the idea is not so strange. Ryan and Jetha talk about sex as a tool for binding together a tribe, for enhancing social relations among the members of a community. But these people already share more than just bodily fluids. A small tribe of human beings in a world of saber-toothed tigers would have to trust each other with their lives; and since food had to be hunted or gathered, everybody needed to pitch in. So the relationships among these people had to be intimate in more than the genital sense. When they fucked each other they weren't just scratching an itch, but making friends and allies on whom they would then depend in a very real way.

The same thing is true, interestingly enough, about the first fully-modern American example that Ryan and Jetha give of a similar approach to sexuality: the "swinging" lifestyle of the Air Force's "top gun" fighter pilots. These were men who faced death on every mission, and who knew implicitly that a third of them would never come back from the war. The way Ryan and Jetha describe it, they used group sex as a bonding experience, tying the men to each other through their wives; what is more, the clear but unspoken implication was that this bonding meant the survivors would take care of the wives and children of those who died. After all, they -- the surviving pilots and the widows of the dead -- had already been lovers, and some of the children carrying a dead man's name might belong to the living. In any event, more generally, they all belonged to the community of fighter pilots. Note again: highly plural sex used to tie together a small, select community ... but with nothing undiscriminating about it.

There is one more example of this kind of sex -- promiscuous but choosy -- that I can't help but think of. It's a literary example this time: the Nest established by friends and followers (water-brothers) of Valentine Michael Smith in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. (See also the Wikipedia entry here.) The dynamic in this story is slightly different, because Valentine Smith is willing to offer his way of understanding the world to anybody willing to put in the work to master it. But the effect is the same; as Jubal Harshaw reminds him, those who don't listen to him select themselves out by choosing to ignore him. So once again, the luxuriously plural sexuality reenforces bonds that hold together a select group in contradistinction to those outside.

I said in my last post that I never resented the sexual encounters Wife had with other lovers when I was included too. Well, it's fair to ask what about that? Did I never think to establish some kind of bond with her other lovers, so that it was somehow us against the outside world? If Ryan/Jetha and Heinlein are on to something, then why not?

The answer is that I thought about it from time to time, but it never worked out. Or almost never. The only two lovers with whom it would have been a possibility were Boyfriend 1 and Boyfriend 4, because those were the only ones who ever ended up in bed with Wife at the same time I was there. And Boyfriend 4 had been a friend of mine from high school, so he was really a special case. But I could never establish that kind of bond with Boyfriend 1 because we never trusted each other. He never trusted me because Wife kept telling him so many terrible things about me (as she did to everybody that would sit still to listen). I never trusted him because, ... well, partly because he wanted to take Wife away from me (based on all the horrible things she had said about me). And partly I just didn't think much of him. I guess he was a nice enough guy, from a distance, but he had absolutely no features that made him (in my eyes) an interesting person to talk to or be around. His tastes were boring and conventional, his conversation was shallow, and he never had a new idea. Other than the sex (and Wife complained to me about that), I couldn't tell what she ever saw in him.

I think I have mentioned that I had this trouble with most of her other lovers: they seemed like losers, at least to me, and I couldn't find anything much to recommend any of them. The exceptions were Boyfriend 4 (who was an alcoholic and recurrently unemployed, but also my friend from high school and a real mensch when sober) and Girlfriend 1 (who certainly seemed destined for better things, but who had absolutely no use for me at all). Whether this was my problem, or whether (as I suggested before) it reflected something significant about Wife's taste, I may not be objective enough to tell. But the upshot was certainly that none of these other models ever worked out for us. Of course, back then (say, when she first started fucking Boyfriend 1) I didn't know anything about the "swinging" fighter pilots; and naturally I had never heard of Ryan or Jetha. But I had read heinlein; and I remember feeling vaguely disappointed somehow that -- if she was going to fuck other men -- we couldn't turn it into some kind of Nest. I have to conclude that for Wife the whole thing was more like scratching an itch; or else that, as a narcissist, she really had no idea what to look for in other people that would constitute community-building qualities, ... nor really had any idea why they might be useful. It's sad.

There is one other conclusion from this line of thought, besides my personal moping. If the only way to make a sexual community work the way that Smith's Nest worked, or the way that prehistoric tribes may have worked, is to be choosy enough about the members that you can build a community where everyone can truly rely on everyone else -- can truly trust everyone else with his life -- then how on earth could it ever be possible to build such communities in the kind of complex and highly mobile society we have today? (I mean, outside of ultra-specialized enclaves like the Air Force in wartime.) Is this another sign that "it's strictly big boxes of bananas, all the way up Columbus Avenue"? Maybe so. But if anyone has any interesting ideas about how this could be possible, I would truly love to hear them.

Movie meme

For the last several weeks, a meme has been spreading its way across the community: whom would you cast in the movie of your life? I haven't been properly tagged, and as a result I think there are rules to the meme that I am likely not following. But it is an interesting question, and I've been mulling it slowly for a while. What follows is kind of a mixed bag. For the most part I have selected actors, not for any physical resemblance, but for a character resemblance -- or a resemblance between the person and the kind of character that actor most often plays. Sometimes the similarity that I see is with a character in one specific movie; in those cases I say so. One thing I learned from this exercise is that I don't watch enough movies, because the exercise was not that easy. Maybe later I'll change my mind about some of them, but for now ....

Hosea: Jimmy Stewart

OK, so I'm flattering myself. It's my blog and I can be a flaming egotist if I want to. But there are a few aspects of the Jimmy Stewart persona that work well for me, I think. The earnestness, the slight social cluelessness ... these are pretty close. Nobody would ever think to associate Jimmy Stewart with romance or intrigue, and that too is a good match. Besides which, I think from time to time of George Bailey's triumphant line, "Hooray! I'm going to jail!" and I realize that in the grand scheme of things my own troubles don't amount to much.

Wife (until this last year): Bette Davis

Wife spent so many years (even before I ever met her) accused of being a hard-boiled bitch that she finally decided she relished the role. And God, was she good at it. She could be "high-maintenance" in a hundred ways, by turns frustrating, maddening, and terrifying. And yet she carried it all off with a style that was invigorating to watch. She personally has always been a big fan of Katharine Hepburn, but Hepburn would be absolutely the wrong choice to portray Wife. For Wife as I always think of her -- as she was when I married her and for a good two decades after -- only Bette Davis combines the panache and the brazen cojones to do her justice.

"Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Wife (just this last year): Allison Janney as Barbara Fitts, in "American Beauty"

I'm not thinking of the obsessive housecleaner; more of the catatonic wallflower. That's an exaggeration, of course, but I don't know how else to characterize what seems to be happening with Wife these days. This deserves a post of its own. For now, I have identified a character.

Son 1: Mickey Rooney

If ever there were a kid anywhere in this country who deserved to be characterized as an "all-American boy" it would be Son 1. Sometimes Wife swears that she gave birth to Tom Sawyer without realizing it.

Son 2: Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker in "The Phantom Menace"

Son 2 is a lot more complicated than Son 1, but I think the very young Anakin Skywalker is a good fit. His compassion seems boundless; his gifts ... unusual in a child his age. In fact it is frequently hard to remember how old he is -- he can play with a silliness that makes him look younger than his years, and then he expresses opinions or insights that make him sound far older. He also has a deep, deep emotional bond with his mother (Wife); that, too, makes him resemble Anakin. I just hope this resemblance isn't a bad omen ....

Boyfriend 5: Leonardo diCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jr., in "Catch Me If You Can"

Young, dashing, romantic, a complete fraud, and a dangerous con man all wrapped into one. How could I possibly choose better?

Boyfriend 4: Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in "Iron Man"

The flip attitude, the perfect sarcastic timing, the degenerate lifestyle, and the incongruous idealism all fit together to make this a very good match. There is even a very vague physical resemblance. Boyfriend 4's addiction to alcohol adds another nice point of comparison.

Boyfriend 3: Burt Lancaster as "Elmer Gantry"

Boyfriend 3 was tall, handsome, and a facile talker. He had a strong jaw, an obtrusively fundamentalist religiosity, and an unexpectedly seedy personal life. Sounds like a good fit to me.

Boyfriend 2: George "Buck" Flower

George "Buck" Flower played characters who were perpetually unkempt and unemployed, and he is one character actor whose name I didn't know before starting to think about this meme. But I remembered the role he played in "Butterfly" and a little research proved that he played similar characters throughout his career. Not a bad fit, really.

Girlfriend 1: the young Elizabeth Taylor

The hair is wrong, the skin is wrong, the nose is wrong ... comparing photographs you could never mistake Girlfriend 1 for Elizabeth Taylor. Not that Girlfriend 1 wasn't radiantly beautiful -- she was! -- but the details were all different. Notwithstanding that, the radiance itself was similar, as was the sense you got from Girlfriend 1 that she was going places. Of all Wife's affairs, she was the only one you could truly believe had "boundless possibilities."

Boyfriend 1: Smurf

I have to ask your indulgence here. He was so long ago that I don't remember him very well. Of course you have every right to assume I was prejudiced against him: but I never thought he was terribly handsome, he was emotionally weak, he had a high squeaky voice ... I'm not sure what more to say.

Counselor: James Garner

This one was hard for me. (Maybe, as noted, I just don't watch enough movies.) I tried to think of physical matches, and I am even sure I have seen actors who look like Counselor ... but I can't for the life of me think of who they are. I finally picked James Garner for the overall unflappability of his characters ... a relaxed unflappability which Counselor certainly shares. I have trouble imagining Counselor as quite so much of a rogue as Garner usually plays; on the other hand, his first career was in advertising so maybe I am not so far off after all ....

I can think of plenty of things wrong with each of these picks, but it has taken me two weeks to come up with them so I'm sticking with what I've got. I'm looking forward to something similar from anybody that hasn't done it yet.

I won't always be..., 2

I've been thinking a little more about this post that I published last night, and I realized that I should probably explain some of the emotional background that makes my attitude relaxed or resigned if not quite complacent. The short version is that it's really not news.

The possibility that Wife might be some day free of me has been in the air for over twenty years, nearly as long as we have been married. When she got involved with Boyfriend 1, a scant two years after the wedding, she thought about trading me in for him. Already, though, she decided against it because of "all the history" that she had "invested" in the relationship with me. (We had, at that point, known each other slightly over three years, for two of which we had been married. Of course, we started living together within a week or two of the first day we met, so that "history" was pretty compressed.) And, in fact, Wife told me that Boyfriend 1's brother had told him, "If you really love this woman you should persuade her to stay with her husband. They may have problems together, but if she sets up a pattern of leaving a relationship after only a couple of years -- without allowing time to work those problems out first -- that pattern could be bad for her in the rest of her life."

Girlfriend 1, a few years later, asked Wife to leave me and go live with her in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that was the kind of dramatic life change Wife was not really prepared to make.

By the time Wife got involved with Boyfriend 2, we had children; and while it was some years before I ever met Boyfriend 2, Wife was very casual about meeting him in a park while she had the kids with her. At some level, I believe her idea was that it would be good for the kids to get to know him and he them, because that way he would have some idea what he would be taking on in case she were to leave me for him and bring the kids as part of the package.

Boyfriend 3 was a very deep emotional relationship, but the affair was tempestuous and short. He was already married (for the third time) to a woman who wouldn't sleep with him (although apparently they had fucked vigorously and often before the wedding), so the question of a future together was a lot more tangled. And before they had time to get very far with it, his wife found out and brought the affair to a screeching halt.

With Boyfriend 4, as I have noted in an early post, Wife felt immediately homey, comfortable, and at ease; and I am reasonably certain (from putting together little things that I heard over the years) that at one point she offered to leave me to marry him. (He turned her down.) In time, though, his alcoholism became a show-stopper for her as far as "happily ever after" is concerned. At some level she still loves him, though.

And actually, by limiting myself to people that I've featured in the blog, I have left out one or two others. There was a time a few years ago, when I was last unemployed, that Wife had a very serious emotional affair going with the lead tenor from the church choir. (I am reasonably sure that it was never consummated -- at the time he was in the middle of a nasty divorce and had just undergone prostate surgery.) This fellow had the advantages (compared to me) of being self-employed and rich; he was also on an emotional wavelength much closer to Wife's than I am. And I think she believed that "some day soon" she would file for divorce and he would pay her legal costs and then the two of them would marry. And live happily ever after.

There might have been other times, that I can't think of right now. But basically this brings us up to the present, with Boyfriend 5.

Now, the first couple of times that I heard Wife talk like this, I was really upset. I felt terribly hurt for what I thought it said about me, and I felt panic at the prospect of losing Wife. And in fact, during the period when I was unemployed, I think she almost meant it. Wife can't stand being subject to forces out of her control (see my long essay "On power") and there was absolutely nothing she could do to get me another job. She couldn't even strike out on her own because her illnesses kept her from working. Divorce would have done nothing to increase her income (unless she succeeded in marrying Lead Tenor), and it certainly would have increased her expenses. But it also would have given her a sense that she was in control, that she was doing something. And I think her desire to be in control of something could have overwhelmed any sense of how irrational such a move really was. Fortunately I found work.

As I say, I used to panic when I heard Wife talk like this. But she has been talking like this for twenty years, and only once (yes, during that time I was out of work) has she ever said she went so far as to talk to a lawyer. (We never got a bill, though, which makes me think this means "chatted with a lawyer in the supermarket checkout line" or something similar.) So maybe I have just become a little jaded. Or, more exactly, I think I have come to see that Wife's desires exist at many different levels; so that even if she wants something desperately at this level, you can't assume she will want it enough at that level to act on it. This is one reason that I was so struck by the quote from Ender Wiggin that I published a while ago. It speaks to exactly this question.

If I have to come up with some kind of bottom-line assessment, I have to start by pointing out that Wife has always felt a profound internal struggle between the need for Roots and the need for Wings. Before her depression was ever diagnosed, when she had no psychiatric medication at all, her regular springtime depression would always take the form of an inconquerable Wanderlust. At a certain point she would be unable to stand it -- anything! -- one minute longer; so she would hop in the car and start driving. It hardly mattered where she went, so long as it was far away. For several years she regularly spent spring break (back when she was a teacher) visiting a friend of ours who lived on a remote farm eight hours away. (I sometimes wondered if he might have been another lover -- he was single, and Wife certainly had some kind of emotional entanglement with him -- but I never worried much about it. He never left his farm if he could help it, never interacted with the outside world, and was therefore never going to have any long-term impact on my life or our marriage. Wife insists that he told her he was gay. Not that it matters -- neither of us has seen him in years, now.)

So much for Wings. At the same time, Wife can be very cautious, almost timid, about other things. She needs security (Roots) as badly as she needs freedom. The same woman who can drive off into the sunset with no plans and no maps and no preparation won't let our kids go on an overnight campout with the Boy Scouts without checking and re-checking their backpacks against the list of recommended gear. They'll never bother changing into that spare pair of clean underwear, but she has to make sure they have it.

And I think that this struggle between Roots and Wings may explain the dynamic of our marriage, or part of it. However she may complain about me, rail at me, or struggle to break free of me, I think that being married to me gives her a kind of security. She knows she has a roof over her head, she knows where her next meal is coming from, and she knows that somebody will pick up the pieces from a dozen little things that she somehow forgets to do. At the same time, she feels this powerful need for freedom; so she has affairs, gets emotionally involved with other people, complains to all of them about what a prick I am, and talks to all of them about how some day in the future she will be free of this ogre she is married to now and can spend time with them alone. And maybe, ... just maybe, ... this pattern of griping and wishing and doing nothing about it is a clever technique she has evolved to satisfy both longings in a delicate balance.

Or maybe not. I like the idea because it has an elegant intellectual appeal -- and as you have all learned by now, I am a real sucker for that sort of thing. But I suppose I shouldn't go quite so far as to let myself get complacent.

Sex and self-esteem

A couple of days ago I wrote about my confusion over what Wife wants from her multiple affairs, and I speculated that maybe even she doesn't know what she wants. I mean, she claims to consider it just a normal part of who she is at this point: ever since I first found an article about polyamory and brought it home, she has claimed the term as a ... well, I almost want to say "badge of honor" but I suppose I have to add that it only counts as that in a very select group.

But part of what makes this so confusing is that there seems to be a part of Wife's mind that is repelled by her own sexuality. She can't even be a pure polyamorist, because she is in some ways so conflicted about sex.

So at this point I have to wonder: What must it feel like inside: ...

• if (on the one hand) you have had multiple lovers and expect to have more in the future, and if you consider this plenitude not to be some kind of bizarre biographical accident but rather to be a fundamental part of Who You Are;
• and yet if (on the other hand) you are also profoundly embarrassed by your own sexual desires, so that you can't talk about them and and hate to admit to them in front of anybody whose esteem matters to you ... i.e., anybody whom you think at all well of?

I guess that this would be a very tough spot to be in. But I suppose, at a theoretical level, that there would be at least two consequences.

• If you feel embarrased by sex and yet feel driven to have a lot of it with different partners, I think that would have to mean that you feel embarrassed by Being You. Another way to say this is that I suppose you would have to feel a chronic, gnawing insecurity about Who You Are -- a deep-seated belief that the Real You is somehow never good enough.
• If you feel embarrased by sex then you won't want to admit to strong sexual needs in front of anybody you think well of ... because it will matter to you that those people respect you, and you will assume that there is no way they could respect you if they only knew what dark desires lurk under your surface persona. But obviously you have to admit to sexual needs to the people whom you actually fuck. Therefore, logically, you are left with no choice but to fuck people whom you do not admire or respect.

All this is hypothetical. But it is interesting to note that both conclusions seem to be true about Wife. On the one hand, she has a pathetically weak sense of self-esteem. And on the other hand, she only falls in love with losers or weaklings.

Let's start with self-esteem.

I am not the first person to note a correlation between poor self-esteem and infidelity. I didn't even come up with the idea independently -- I read it somewhere. (I forget where I first saw it, but you can find a reference by following this link.) All I have done is to try to analyze this idea in the case of Wife, in particular, to see if it fits. Ironically, nobody who has just met Wife for the first time would ever guess that she has low self-esteem, because she usually comes across as so condescending and arrogant. But I have come to believe that this seeming arrogance is meant merely as a defense against feelings of inferiority. Two examples:

• Wife believes firmly that she is ugly. There's no point trying to argue this with facts; she has had "body issues" for something like the last four decades, and she runs down her own appearance routinely as if it were some basic requirement of polite conversation. Nor does this appear to be part of some strategy to elicit compliments from others. The other morning she was sitting on our bed wearing nothing but a skimpy nightie, and I told her how genuinely attractive I find her ... still, after all the years we have been married. Her response was to curl up in a ball in fetal position and beg me to stop saying it.
• Wife is always comparing other people's intelligence (unfavorably) with her own, but she is gnawingly disappointed in her own achievement. She got a perfectly respectable B.A. from a fine undergraduate college, but she never finished graduate school. To this day, she alternately claims degrees she was never awarded and insists that I must look down on her for not completing a professional degree. (Since she has more years of graduate school than I do, I really don't think I treat her in a way that would justify this belief to the average person.)

For what it is worth, the cripplingly low self-esteem seems to be something she shares with both sisters, and with her mother. Naturally I don't know their complete sexual histories, so I can't tell if the correlation between low self-esteem and high infidelity holds true for all three. But one sister is on her fifth husband; the other was on her third several years ago, when we lost track of her. Wife's mother always claimed to have had three husbands, except that a few years ago she told us there was a fourth -- before any of the others -- with whom she eloped to Mexico so there was no legal record. Oh, and this fourth fellow was the real father of her first child, who had always been called the child of her first [acknowledged] husband. And did I mention that neither Wife nor her younger sister look anything like any of her mother's husbands, but they both look a lot like a good friend who hung around the house for many years? Or that she met each husband in sequence while still married to the previous one? These facts could all be isolated coincidences; certainly they prove nothing in a logical or even legal sense. But they are interesting.

What about falling in love with losers and weaklings?

Well, let's work our way backwards from the present.

• Boyfriend 5 is a terrorist (or rather a family of terrorists). Are they successful? They have to hide indoors whenever a police patrol cruises through town. The only jobs they can hold are doing administrative work for their organization. One of the three of them is a drug addict. I'm not sure there's a lot more I need to add.
• Boyfriend 4 is a chronically unemployed alcoholic. Nice guy, though.
• Boyfriend 3 was already on his third marriage (and probably his hundredth affair) when he frst met Wife. Neither of his two former wives will speak to him any more, and he is estranged from the children they bore him. His current children don't respect him and have trouble staying disciplined in school.
• Boyfriend 2 has never held a regular job in his life. The woman who bore his child lives in another city, and the child will grudgingly speak to her father by phone once a year -- on Father's Day.
• Girlfriend 1 was probably the only one of the lot worth more than the powder to blow her to Hell -- she was smart, organized, and ambitious -- and she was the one (ultimately) to abandon Wife. When Wife has tried to contact her since then via e-mail, Girlfriend 1 has never responded. But at the time they first became involved, Girlfriend 1 was only 18 and Wife was an adult and a professional; so there was still a clear power differential.
• Boyfriend 1? Gosh, that's reaching way back. He had a job and he wasn't chemically dependent, so that means he wasn't quite as bad a loser as any of Wife's other boyfriends since. But he was chronically irresolute: simple decisions between vanilla and chocolate were major life crises for him. His irresolution also seemed to manifest itself (from what I was told second-hand) in a disconcerting tendency to lose his erections in bed, with no ejaculation and no other warning. Wife complained to me more than once that one of the frustrating things about fucking Boyfriend 1 was the risk of "having the car engine die in the middle of an intersection."

On the whole, I guess I find it remarkable that the results are so consistent. As near as I can tell, every single one of Wife's affairs in the last decade (and almost every affair since our marriage) has been with a weakling or a loser. Of course, maybe there have been others I don't know about.

When I first noticed this pattern, my thought was that Wife was trying to cope with her own feelings of inferiority by surrounding herself with people, as Monty Python once put it, "whom almost anyone can look down on." But that didn't explain the sex. I guess nobody wants to have sex with the Village Idiot. I am more satisfied with the idea I propose above: that it is only to such people that Wife can dare to admit her own sexual cravings, because it's not like they have any grounds to give themselves airs or think they are better than she is.

And if that is true, it is really, really sad. I wish I knew an easy cure, and that Wife had any interest in being cured.