Busy girl

And all this time I somehow thought Wife was just sitting back, staring at the walls and moping!

You all know Wife has an account on OKCupid, and that she was seeing Pop for a while. I also knew that she had struck up correspondences with a number of other men on the site. What I didn't know was that she was fucking two of them! Better than that ... she is fucking one of them (do I call him Boyfriend 6?) while she coos to him about wanting permanence and about how his warm body against hers has done wonders for her depression; and then at the same time she is "cheating" on him (her word, not mine) with another one (Boyfriend 7?) who knows about Boyfriend 6 but not vice versa. Wife tells Boyfriend 7 to be very careful that Boyfriend 6 not find out about them, because she doesn't want to spoil the potential for a permanent relationship with him.

I'm not sure I'll be able to keep these two straight with mere numbers, so maybe I had better give them names as well: I'll call Boyfriend 6 "Kevin" (which is close enough) and Boyfriend 7 "Jenner" (ditto). Then there's Al, with whom she appears (so far) to be "just good friends": they get together every so often to go walking.

Apparently Son 2 knows about these guys, or at any rate knows that they are friends of Wife. (I'm not sure she has let on that she is fucking both of them -- one behind the other's back, no less! -- but knowing how poor Wife's boundary control is, I can't be sure she didn't.) Last weekend Kevin (B6) gave Wife a whole bunch of food, which she explained away to me by saying that her friend Leia's mom is getting senile and buying food she doesn't need so she helped Leia clean out her mom's refrigerator. Come to think of it, Wife repeated that story to Son 2, while complaining to him that I didn't believe her. (That's not at all what I had said, but she has a hard time listening.) So I guess she is not totally transparent with Son 2 either -- and thank God for small favors! Meanwhile a few days ago she was still trying to meet up with Pop for breakfast, but apparently he promised he'd be available on a certain day and then skipped town.

This must explain why she was suddenly motivated to vacuum the house yesterday, after years of neglect: one of the two of them must have been coming over, and she wanted the place to look nice. It explains why she is always so careful to make the bed ... because she has been using it during the day, and has probably washed the sheets on top of it. My God, it has been years since she showed that much initiative or energy! There must be something to the idea that all them endorphins kicking around in your brain can make you do all kinds of unexpected things.

The only thing I kind of wonder is why she has bothered to hide it from me? Why should she care what I think, any more? Am I going to do anything about it? Well, in cold honesty I no longer care where she shops her body around as long as she doesn't interfere with the rest of us. Son 2 is in eighth grade, which means that next September he will almost certainly be out of the house at boarding school somewhere; and at that time, we'll just dissolve the marriage. There will be no more reason to stick together. And if I have stuck it out this long, there's no real reason not to stick it out just a little bit longer.

Now how do I break the news to D, that Wife is getting more sex than she (D) is? That's not going to go over at all well ...! I suppose I can try to console her that at any rate Wife's not getting me, but I don't know how much comfort she will find that. I don't know. But I do think it is remarkable that Wife can still conceal that much of what she does, after all these years when I thought I had learned to read her pretty well.

What a busy, busy girl ...!

You can kind of tell these things

Wife has been spending a lot of time lately on the phone with her friend Leia, because Leia is breaking up with her live-in boyfriend of the last 10 years and is having a rough time of it. More exactly, Leia has been supporting this fellow for the last 10 years, and she is finally throwing him out. But she is having a lot of anxiety and heartbreak over doing so. Leia, like Wife, has serious longterm health issues, and her boyfriend has looked after her through many of her illnesses. Also, Leia is in her 50's by now, and is afraid of living alone the rest of her life. So why throw this man out? Gosh, let's see ....

• He has a difficult relationship with his ex-wife, who sounds psychotic from everything I have heard. (To be fair, I only hear what Wife tells me that Leia has told her, so who really knows?) But Leia gets caught in the crossfire.
• He has a difficult relationship with his children. (I forget how old they are now, but they are all by his ex-wife; if he has been with Leia for 10 years, they can't be exactly kids.)
• He doesn't seem to be able to get or hold a job, notwithstanding an impressive technical background.
• He has a chronic gambling addiction. This has been a problem for Leia for some years now, actually.
• He visits prostitutes. (This one was news to me.)

Real winner, huh? What a great guy ... how could Leia ever think of throwing him out? [insert sarcastic roll of the eyes here]

More seriously, how could he have kept all these facts hidden way back when Leia was first getting involved with him?

If I remember right, he didn't. Oh, the bit about prostitutes was news to me. And the gambling addiction may not have been visible a full 10 years ago, although Leia has been struggling with it (and him) for several years by now. But I'm sure I remember Wife talking to me way back then, after she would get off the phone with Leia or after Leia would drop by to visit us, saying how concerned she was that this "new boyfriend" seemed to have a lot of dangerous flaws and that Leia could end up getting seriously used or badly hurt. Or both. I don't remember all the details of these conversations -- I was only listening with half my attention, and they were (after all) a decade ago -- but I would be reasonably confident in vouching for this much.

So what happened? If all these risks were visible up front, why did Leia let this jerk move into her pants and her house in the first place?

I think she just chose not to see them, or to minimize them. Wife says she didn't want to say anything for fear of alienating her friend, so she didn't actually announce "Leia, you are walking into a field of land mines." But the only way Wife could have known about these problems is if she heard them from Leia -- it's not like she ever met this guy in person. Leia lives several hundred miles from here, but her elderly mother is in the same town where we are. So she comes to visit here several times a year. We've never been there. Wife calls but hasn't flown out. In other words, Leia saw the same warning signs Wife did, registered them consciously enough that she told Wife all about them, and then marched forward anyway. Something -- maybe infatuation, maybe fear of being alone -- overcame any kind of reasonable caution. Yes, it is terrible to see the meltdown of a relationship; but often, even at the beginning, you can kind of tell these things about each other.

And after all, isn't that exactly what I did with Wife? I knew a lot about her before we ever married. (Not before we started fucking, but that's because we started fucking the second time we met.) I knew that she complained a lot, that she could fly into irrational rages about little shit, that she lied casually (at least to her mother), that she said horrible things about her family behind their backs, that she needed a lot of care and maintenance. I knew all these things, and despite them all I stood up and said "I do." I made excuses for her; I told myself she would get better; I believed that somehow -- if only I were strong enough to hang in there and if only I could love her enough -- she would change and we could live happily ever after. It's true I didn't understand how unlikely people are to change the truly fundamental aspects of their characters; but I surely did understand what her character was like. I just ignored what I knew.

I recently heard from yet another friend who just broke up with her lover (a married man this time) after finding out about his other mistress, and his many short flings, and the prostitutes he has frequented, and ... and ... and .... She writes that all the signs were there in front of her long ago, and she can't understand how she ignored them all for so long. What was she thinking?

But I'm not surprised. It happened to Leia, it happened to me, ... why not her too? Why not all of us? The fact is that really, often, you can kind of tell these things right from the beginning. And then you can ignore everything that you see and know. Not too encouraging, is it?

Ancestor worship

It's Saturday, but I had to go into work for a few hours anyway.

When I got home, Wife was on the phone with her friend Leia. Leia has been in town for a few days now, and they have spent a couple of days together. Apparently they spent some time apartment hunting for Wife, because that's what they were discussing on the phone. The thing is, Leia wants to sell some income property she owns in the next state over, and is looking for other property to reinvest the money. Since her mother lives in the same town we do and is getting up in years, Leia has considered buying an apartment for her mother, too. So anyway, since she was already looking at property, she seems to have taken Wife along.

I heard Wife (for her part) making some comments to the effect that it would be out of the question for her to share an apartment with a roommate; after all, she has done that before (three times, she said) and it "never works out." She also commented that naturally she would have to be able to pay for storage for all of her stuff as well, in order to avoid having to get rid of it. And the upshot appears to have been that (within the parameters she is willing to consider) she can't find anything she can afford. I know you are shocked. But when I stepped into the room after she was off the phone, she was weeping silently over this turn of fate.

I pointed out that naturally it must be possible to live in our town somehow on a limited income, because there are actually poor people in town. They live somewhere. But she repeated her saga of woe that nothing was to be found anywhere in a one hour radius in every direction.

Nothing?

Anywhere?

An hour?

Gosh, did they really travel that far afield?

And she reminded me of all the treasures she has to be able to house. I suggested to her that she has always said she kept those things because they are valuable; and in that case, she could sell them -- realize the value -- and have more money to play with. But no, of course that wouldn't fly: after all, she wanted them in order to hand them down to the next generation. And remind me: the next generation wants to have them ... why again? I urged that the physical things we hand down are always tossed out callously by that same esteemed "next generation" when they break or become unfashionable ... and that the only real, lasting heirlooms we can pass down are memories. She said, "Well that's the sort of thing D would do, ...!" (And she managed to squeeze a remarkable amount of venom into the name "D" as she said it. I smiled to myself.) But no, you see she wants to pass down things that belonged to members of her family, for no better reason than that they belonged to members of her family. It doesn't matter whether she herself even knew the previous owners, and in some cases she is talking about possessions of a grandmother who dies before she was born. But somehow there is a mystical bond that requires that the object be cherished into eternity. It's ancestor-worship, I think ... or it would be (would have to be) if she thought it out into a consistent system.

Completely meshugge.