Blast from the past: Wife on the prayer line

[I'm not sure why this story came to me this evening. Well maybe I can trace how the notion bubbled to the surface of my mind, if I try really hard; but I suppose it doesn't matter. So far as I can tell, it's not a story I've told before now. It's ancient history, but maybe helps flesh out the picture I have tried to draw of those days.]

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Hosea's log: Star date ... early-to-mid January 2005.
Location: back in the house we sold in 2013.
Wife's romantic status: Deeply enmeshed in her short but torrid affair with Boyfriend 3.

I think I've mentioned (in an off-hand way that I don't expect anyone to remember) that for a while Wife was an active volunteer on a prayer line. This was in the years not long after she went onto Disability and stopped working. At the time she was exploring the local Evangelical churches and looking for ministries that she felt called to. This was one of them. She would volunteer to man the phone during certain hours, and they gave her a little gizmo to attach to our landline. [That's how long ago it was.] When her time came, she switched the gizmo on, and calls to the prayer line would be routed to our phone. (Or to anyone else who was on-duty at the same time, of course.) The phone would ring; she would ask the strangers at the other end what they needed prayer with; and then she would pray with them. Rinse and repeat, until her time was done.

Anyway, one day Boyfriend 3 came over to visit—sorry, I mean "came over to fuck"—while the boys were at school and I was at work. 

Poor boundary control

Janeway raised a question on my post from a couple days ago, and my answer began to get a bit long. (You're shocked, I realize.) By the time I hit my third paragraph, I decided to graduate it from a comment to a post of its own.

She asked:

Okay, so all you asked of her regarding her ongoing extramarital activity is not to let the boys find out that she's fucking someone else. Yet, not only has she introduced son #2 to this man, but also feels comfortable enough with son's knowing him that she can recount stories about him?

The short answer is:

Yes, that's right.

The longer version is, ... well, a little longer.

In the first place, she might not remember my saying anything. Wife has a lot of trouble remembering things she doesn't want to remember, in much the same way that she is very good at misremembering things when the altered version fits one of her ongoing narratives better.

In the second place, even if she did remember, I'm not surprised at her doing something else instead. In general I'm reluctant ever to ask her anything, because it sometimes seems that the mere fact that I asked her makes her want to do the opposite. If this were a Dr. Seuss book instead of real life, I would start asking her to do the opposite of what I want in the first place, but the pattern isn't quite reliable enough or mechanical enough for that. And maybe I am overstating it? But some days it sure does seem like that ....

Of course, you might think that she would be motivated to keep that part of her life separate anyway. Basic privacy concerns would be one reason. ("Sweetie, I'd like you to meet the man who has been banging the daylights out of Mommy every day this week while you've been in math class." Maybe not.) Then there are those warnings I read that in case of a divorce children automatically take sides against whichever parent (if any) they think has been screwing around.

But Wife has always had very poor boundary control.

• Back when she was seeing Boyfriend 2, she would meet him in a public park with the boys in tow and then she and he would talk while the boys clambered all over the playground equipment. (I assume they were only talking, in a public parkwhen the boys might come back at any moment wanting a snack. I never heard any stories to the contrary.)



• Boyfriend 3 was a relative of some friends of my parents, so she was quite open about taking the kids to go see him and his family. The sexual involvement lasted only a couple weeks before he broke it off because his wife found out and he had an attack of religious conscience. But the emotional involvement had been building for some time, and it never occurred to Wife that she needed to be at all discreet.



• Boyfriend 4 lived with us for two years, so he may be a special case. In some ways I think the boys became fonder of him (as a kind of uncle-figure) than Wife ever was, especially after they stopped fucking.



• And as for the whole Boyfriend-5/Friend drama, well of course that played out online. But Wife certainly discussed them with the boys. At any rate she discussed the parts she thought were innocuous, such as that they were terrorists, or that they bred dogs. But could she keep the romantic lilt out of her voice? I doubt it. I know for a fact that Son 2 watched over her shoulder as she signed off an IM-conversation with "ILYAAF" and guessed correctly what the initials stood for.

So no, I am not terribly surprised that she let Son 2 meet Pop, nor that she would tell him stories.

To be sure, the story that I overheard wasn't a terribly flattering one. Pop took her to lunch at a restaurant somewhere, and then right around the end of the meal had to make a couple of phone calls. So he got up and left the restaurant and was pacing back and forth outside, talking nonstop into his phone and chain smoking. The waitress brought the bill and Wife was left sitting there, alone and embarrassed, saying "My date had to make a call but he'll be back." (Yes, she used the word "date" when telling the story to Son 2.) It was a long time -- I don't know how long, but she made it sound an eternity -- before he came back and paid the bill so they could leave.

Now, Wife was telling this story in order to say what a rotten guy Pop was for being so rude. (This was Thursday night, by which time she was already pretty disenchanted with him.) But I couldn't help interrupting at that point with a theory: "He probably wasn't just rude. He was probably relying on your embarrassment being so acute that you couldn't make yourself just sit there and wait, so that you would pay the bill yourself and leave rather than wait for him to come back and settle up. He must have been very disappointed when you stuck it out like that." Wife took this as an occasion to congratulate herself with, "Well, I stood my ground." But what a sad choice of something to congratulate oneself on ... outwaiting your date in the slow race for the check!

Deciding about a funeral

Towards the end of February, we were notified about the upcoming memorial service for a long-time friend of my parents, a man I’ll call, with considerable charity, Tartuffe. For anybody who is keeping track, Tartuffe was the father of Wife’s Boyfriend 3. (I know I haven’t written a lot about him before, but he is the one I characterized as Elmer Gantry way back in this post here. I mentioned that his father was dying last fall here and here .) Anyway, Wife spent some time agonizing over whether to attend the service.

There was a logistical side to the question, because the service was to be be held in a city about four or five hours away from us. Wife is afraid to drive that far by herself, because she might get tired or disoriented. I wasn’t planning to go: I really think I have seen all I need in this lifetime of any of the members of that extended family, and I don't want the boys around them. My parents were going, but they live maybe halfway between us and this other city so it’s not as far for them. (And it would be rather out of the way for them to come fetch her.)

Why did she want to go? A couple of reasons: (1) Wife started off hating Tartuffe, but in the end she probably appreciated his particular brand of craziness better than anyone else. And (2) she figured this would be the last time she'd ever be able to see Boyfriend 3, because Ivy (B3’s wife) was so furious at the affair that she would prevent them ever meeting again. But Ivy couldn't very well interfere with a funeral. So the logistical question was how Wife should get down there. In the end, she called my father and asked for a ride -- with the thought that perhaps he could fetch her on Friday, they could all go to the service together on Saturday, and he could bring her back to our place on Sunday. He said he would have to talk to my mother about it.

But then she told me that she was reconsidering ... maybe she didn't want to go after all.

Hosea: Really? Why not?

"Well," she said with some asperity, "I hadn't realized that Boyfriend 3 had told his father all about the affair, and that his father had told your father all about it too."

Hosea: Mmmm?

Yes, well apparently all my father had said was that Tartuffe had always had a lascivious imagination and that my dad assumed in his later years he got carried away with it. This is a really vague, nebulous, almost meaningless statement, but it is the sort of thing my dad says when he is trying not to say something else. And then apparently my father had gone on to say that Ivy was still very jealous of Wife.

Hosea: Really? That's all?

I reminded Wife that she had told me almost identically the same story some four years ago; so it sounded to me like nothing in particular had changed between then and now in terms of who has told whom what.

Wife: [in a stage whisper] And I'm sure you've told them all about it too.

Hosea: Huh? I asked. What are you getting at?

No answer.

Hosea: OK look. It sounds to me like nothing has changed in the last four years.

Wife: [sullenly] Well I never knew before today that your dad had heard about Boyfriend 3 and me.

Hosea: Oh come on, you told me the exact same story nearly word for word, years ago. So yes, of course you knew all about it. And you have enjoyed my parents' hospitality plenty of times since then, like at Christmas, or earlier this month when we went down to visit. So if nothing has changed since then, and if it was fine then, why not now?

Wife: [still bitterly] Yes, I went down for Christmas. And all they wanted to know when we were down there is why we were splitting up. I just told them we didn't seem to be able to get along any more.

Hosea: But of course. If you introduce a topic of conversation [I know from things my father has said that she was the one to bring up the subject of divorce] then it is only reasonable to expect people to ask, "Oh really? Tell me all about it." That's just polite, and if they hadn't asked you'd be complaining that they didn't care about anything you said. So anyway, what is the big difference between then and now, as far as holding up your face in front of my parents is concerned?

She said she didn't want to talk about it any more and stalked off to the bedroom.

When dinner was on autopilot for a few minutes, I ambled back to rejoin the conversation and proposed a different way of looking at the situation. "If you are worried about people talking," I said, "you'll never stop them talking by staying away. They'll still talk regardless. All you achieve by staying away is depriving yourself of the chance to be at Tartuffe's memorial service. And you probably felt more kinship with his odd perspective than many people did. (She made an affirmative noise.) So where is the sense in your staying away? I mean, do what you want either way; but I don't think the things you are talking about have much bearing on it."

Rather than answering, she launched in a different direction by saying, "I also don't know what your father meant when he told Ivy that after all the changes I've gone through lately I'm no threat any more."

Hosea: [thinks to self: Gosh, I have a really good idea what he meant! But it would have been gratuitously unkind to say so. So instead I said, ...] I have no idea what he meant. I'm lousy at reading minds. Did you ask him?

Wife: No, I just assumed he meant that I no longer have the charm or looks or sparkle or intelligence to catch a man's attention any more. It's nice to know [she added, pouting] that I've become a devoted spinster.

I wasn't sure what to say to that, and pretty soon it was dinner time. After dinner, as she was settling into bed, I thought of something else.

Hosea: You know, you told me once long ago that my father had said things to you that made you think he knew about you and Boyfriend 1, too. And that was many years ago. So it really doesn't seem like you have anything to worry about here.

Wife: Oh sure, she said. Why don't we just haul all of them out?

Hosea: Huh? I'm not sure what you mean.

Wife: You know, your father also accused me of sleeping with your brother! [What is that supposed to prove???]

Hosea: I don't know what you are getting at. I'm just saying that maybe you are worrying over something which is a non-issue. I mean, it seems like whatever you are worrying about that would keep you from attending, that horse ran out of the barn years ago. It's probably pretty silly to worry about locking the door now.

Wife: [deep sigh] Well, Boyfriend 3 promised me that he wouldn't tell anybody.

Hosea: Oh, but you're not angry about that, are you? Having people talk about you when you have an affair pretty much comes with the territory. Besides, it looks to me like a pretty good example of a "natural consequence" like we are always trying to teach the boys. You know, if you do this there is a good risk you will experience that. So you had your eyes open to the possibilities when you walked into the affair in the first place. [In fact, I don't for a minute believe she was aware of the probable consequences when she fell into bed with Boyfriend 3. I think Wife is very bad at forseeing the consequences of her actions. But I wanted to plant the suggestion that she had in fact been smart enough to see that far ahead, in order thereby to plant the suggestion that she isn't really angry or bitter. It sounds far-fetched, but I'm not convinced it was entirely a fool's errand. Moving on, I used the following analogy ....] It's like if you are late for something so you decide to speed down the highway. You know that if you speed, you run a certain percent risk of getting caught by the sheriff and getting a ticket. So if you are caught you aren't mad at the sheriff ... because you knew from the get-go that it was a possibility. And it is the same thing here, with facing the consequence of being talked-about. You knew that was a chance before you started up in the first place.

Wife: Well, I thought the benefits outweighed the costs, but I was wrong about that. And that's what I regret the most: that I lost a really great friendship in the bargain.

Now, personally, I'm not sure I see how that particular friendship could possibly have stayed out of bed forever, because both of them were needy and insecure, and both of them had weak or missing personal boundaries. But again, it would have been unkind to say that. What I said instead was, ....

Hosea: I think that's another one of these risks of any affair, again like getting a ticket when you are speeding. Certainly nothing to be angry about. But just one of those things. Heck, you’ve read a lot of literature. You must have read hundreds of works where making a friendship sexual ruins the friendship. So you must have known it could happen. ["Hundreds of works of literature"??? Where the heck did that come from? Sometimes these things just pop into my mouth and I say them even if they make no sense. But she didn't bat an eye.]

Wife: Hmmm. Well, I hear Ivy is still doing Weight Watchers, so at least I would have the sweet revenge of walking in wearing a size 6. [I think I have mentioned that Wife used to be very heavy.]

Inside I thought, My God you must be kidding. You look 80 years old, and not even an attractive 80. You looked way better a hundred pounds heavier than you are now. But what I really said was, ...

Hosea: Gosh, is revenge that important to you?

Wife: Well, Ivy accused me of a lot of things that weren't true.

Hosea: Of course she did. [I don't know if she did or not, but it hardly matters in this context.] But that's just what you would expect her to do. If you were writing this situation up in a novel, that's exactly what you would make the Ivy-character do. So you can't possibly be mad at her for that.

Wife: Hmmm. I need to sleep.
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P.S.: In the end, the weather was inclement enough that my parents decided not to make the trip, so the whole discusion was moot. Life is a series of anticlimaxes.

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.

Plans for the week?

The kids are out of town on a school trip. I am out of town on business. What are Wife's plans?

I wish I knew: partly for all the easy, base reasons (jealousy, prurience, all those vices that we're supposed to be able to overcome as adults), and partly because I wish she felt she had some reason to trust me with information like that.

Does she have any such reason? I don't know. I haven't yelled over any of her amours in a long time. The only times I get nasty about them are when she tries to hide what is going on. I don't know what it takes for her to trust me on a topic like this, but I wish I knew the criteria and could find some way to meet them.

Do I trust her when she tells me that her only plans involve watching movies and sewing a new dress? No, not really.

The last time she had a week to herself like this, she spent much of it in bed with Boyfriend 2. Last weekend she told me that she had broken up with Boyfriend 2 "for good" a few months ago. I have no idea whether she is in contact with Boyfriend 3. If she is, he would be in easy driving distance and a likely partner -- the emotional side of that affair was way more intense than most of her others, and she tells me he is really fantastic in bed. (This is just the kind of thing a husband wants to hear, ain't it? On the other hand, if it is true then yes, I would rather hear it. Lying is poisonous.) The flip side is that if Boyfriend 3's wife ever catches him with my Wife again, she'll cut off his balls with a kitchen knife. Boyfriend 4 is too far out of town these days to be a realistic possibility, and Wife continues to insist to me that they are now "just friends". In a way that's almost too bad. For all his faults, Boyfriend 4 was in many ways my favorite of the lot; and as long as he had her attention, she was less likely to wander off with one of the others.

Then there is Boyfriend 5, but he (or "they" -- see my previous post) is allegedly out of the country and unavailable.

But Wife hasn't been approaching this week as gloomy and depressed as I would expect if she were going to be all alone. Is that just residual giddiness from her new online affair with Boyfriend 5 (all of them)? Or does she have other plans that she is just keeping quiet?

Inquiring minds want to know. They just won't get a chance to find out, I expect ....

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?