A visit from the police

We had a visit from the police this evening, and I want to write down what happened while it is still clear in my mind. 

 

[Already this evening I have sent this story, minus a little editing, to my father, my brother, and D.]

 

It all started – so far as I can tell – because of dinner.  We got home from the Shakespeare Festival about 6:30 pm, and of course nobody had been here over the weekend to do any shopping or to plan dinner.  I offered that this was no problem because I had one meal left over in the refrigerator.  So we all unpacked our bags from the trip.  The meal I had left over was a cauliflower-and-tomato dish I had prepared last week before leaving for the Festival.  I remembered that Son 1 hadn't liked it much, but there was enough to feed everybody so long as I made a starch to dish it over; so I decided to make up a starch that would appeal to anybody in the crowd who didn't like the cauliflower.  I made a big pot of spaghetti.  Then in a separate pan I cooked up about a pound of bacon (cut into little pieces) and a huge onion (itself the better part of a pound) … diced and with plentiful garlic added as well.  When I poured the water off the spaghetti I added the bacon-onion-garlic mixture, added a cup of parmesan cheese, and stirred it all in with the noodles.  Then I called everyone to the table, saying, "Take a plate, dish yourself up some noodles, dish up some vegetables on top of them, and have a seat."

 

We went through dinner uneventfully.  Son 1 took lots of noodles and just a bit of vegetables; he told me he loved the noodles.  Son 2 said, "Cauliflower! Hooray!" and dished up plenty of both.  (He also went and got seconds on both.)  Wife took just a little bit and then sat at the table motionless and stared straight ahead.  She did not eat.  The boys and I talked about silly stuff for a while, and dinner seemed to be moving along just fine.  Then Wife announced, "I have to eat more protein than this before I go to bed."  It was phrased as a plaint, where I couldn't rightly tell if it was a statement or a request for permission.  I looked at her a little puzzled and reminded her that she's a grownup and doesn't need to ask permission if she wants something else for dinner.  She retorted something (I don't remember what) and the boys chimed in to the effect of, "Fine, Mom, whatever. Go get something else if you want."  So she got up, dumped her dinner down the sink, and started rummaging in the kitchen for some cottage cheese.  We are out of cottage cheese but I reminded her that we have eggs, so she scrambled herself a couple of eggs and ate those.  Then she sat sullenly and stared at the table.

 

The boys were still having fun with some topic, ricocheting off each other, but I commented to Wife that she looked very tired.  She agreed she was.  I continued that if she was really so tired she had to go to bed, everybody would understand.  She got up from the table, then said that she needed somebody to help her get her box of medications down from the shelf in the closet in the study.  I got up and joined her in the study, and we got down her box of meds.

 

While I was there, I closed the door because I wanted to talk to her without involving the boys and I said, "I know you didn't like dinner, but blaming it on your need for protein was a lie.  You had a great big three-egg omelet with cheese and other fillings for breakfast and lunch, which means you have already had lots of protein today.  What is more, your so-called need for a certain amount of protein is a pretty elastic thing, because I have seen any number of days where you have eaten junk all day and hardly any protein.  So I want *you* to understand that *I* understand that your claims about how much protein you need are just an excuse you pull out when you want to blame somebody else for what they have cooked.  And I would rather you not hide behind your health as an excuse, and just admit you don't like something."

 

This provoked a torrent of replies.  Partly she insisted that she really does eat protein at every single meal (which is absurd).  And partly she hurled a torrent of vitriol at me for "all that vegetarian shit you have been cooking lately!"  The conversation went on far longer than it should have or needed to, growing to include everything she could think of to hate about me … which seems to have been a long list.  Anyway, finally she brought it back around again to the question of food and cooking, and insisted that the boys hate everything I cook just as much as she does.  As you know, I have asked her to keep them out of our fights. 

 

She replied, "I know you don't want me speaking for the boys, but they really do hate all this vegetarian shit you keep cooking! I'll go ask them right now!"

 

I happened to be standing between her and the door at that point, and I repeated, "No, please keep them out of our argument."

 

At that point she suddenly changed direction and cried out, "You're blocking my exit from the room! That's kidnapping and it's a crime!"

 

I should have been stunned at the non sequitur, but in fact she has lobbed this kind of verbal grenade at me before.  I don't remember my exact words, but I said something like, "Oh for Pete's sake, I'm not kidnapping you. Sheesh, if you really believed that you'd call the police."

 

And so she walked over to the telephone and dialed 9-1-1.

 

This was completely nuts, so I rolled my eyes, shrugged, and left the study to see what the boys were doing.  They had both finished eating, had cleared their dishes from the table, and were rolling around on the floor playing.  A minute later she came out of the study and then the phone rang.  I picked it up.

 

"Good evening, may I help you?"

 

"Hello, this is the 9-1-1 operator.  Is there any trouble at your location?"

 

"Ummm, … no, I don't think so."

 

"Well I was just talking to a female voice who called us and then hung up. Is there a female there?"

 

"There's my wife. Would you like to talk to her?"

 

"Yes please."

 

I turned around to Wife who had come into the room, and asked her "Could you please pick up the other line?"

 

She went back into the study, picked up the phone, and I hung up my end.  She had left the study door wide open, so when I walked back that direction to see what was up I heard her saying, "Yes he always locks me into rooms …. No I don't think I'm in any danger tonight …. yes .… no ….  OK, good bye."

 

I asked her, "What's up?"

 

"They said they have to send someone out here to check up on us."

 

And sure enough a few minutes later there was a knock on the door.  By this time the boys were in the living room, so they jumped up to get it.  When they opened the door, there were two policemen standing there, one shining his flashlight into the house. 

 

I walked up and asked (again) "Can I help you?"

 

The first policeman asked, "Are you the man of the house?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Could you please step out here for a moment?"

 

So I stepped out onto the front yard to talk to the first policeman while his partner went inside.  He left the front door open, but I asked him please to watch that the cats didn't escape and so he closed the screen door.

 

The first policeman started by asking my name: I gave it to him and then handed him my driver's license to simplify the whole process of determining who I am.  He asked me what had happened, and I spelled out exactly the story I just described above.  He asked a couple questions in the process of my spelling this all out.  Meantime I heard the voice of his partner and Wife's voice mumbling a conversation inside.

 

Then he asked, "Is there any history of domestic violence?"

 

I explained that yes, Wife had been arrested for domestic violence back in the summer of 2004 (I had to stop for a minute to remember when it was) because she had let herself slip off of her medications and then threw a tantrum that spun way out of control.  He asked, "Did she go to jail that night?"  Yes she did, but then afterwards I didn't press charges so the court assigned her to some kind of anger management class and otherwise dropped it.  I added that I was sure he could find the police records somewhere, but he explained that he didn't necessarily need all the details.  He just has a list of questions he has to ask.

 

About that time his partner came out and the two of them conferred for a moment; then they traded places.  First Policeman went in to talk to Wife, while Second Policeman kept me company.  He didn't really have any questions, though, so we just passed the time until First Policeman was done and had come outside again.  The one of them thought to ask, "Does anybody in the house own a firearm?"

 

I could hear that Wife had crept close to the screen door to listen closely to how I answered this, because I still have not told her where her revolver is.  So I answered scrupulously accurately, but without naming anybody:

 

"Yes, my wife bought a revolver a long, long time ago.  Back when she was arrested for domestic violence she had to give it up for a while – I forget how long – and she did so.  But then when the time period was up she got it back.  Some time later we were on a routine visit to see my parents and I discovered she had packed her revolver in with her toothpaste and underwear and other personal effects.  We had been fighting just before that so this really frightened me.  [At this the policemen made noises suggesting maybe they didn't think this sounded exactly normal either.]  Anyway, I removed it from her stuff and left it with somebody else, asking them to keep it far far away."  I was a little concerned that by handing the revolver off without a paper trail I might have violated some state regulation, but all the officer asked was, "So it's nowhere in your dwelling at this point?"

 

"No sir, it is not."

 

At this point Wife piped up that she was really interested to hear what I had said because I have never told her where it is and sometimes I have said misleading or inconsistent things about where it might be.  But the officer simply told her, "The important thing ma'am is that it is nowhere in the dwelling.  That's what your husband tells us, and you say you don't know where it is, so that's good enough for me."  Wife spluttered some more, but the officer plainly considered that question closed.

 

The only remaining issue as far as the two policemen were concerned was whether they could afford to leave us alone.  They explained that of course they would have to write a report, but it was just going to he a "he-said, she-said" kind of report with no further action.  Did I think they could afford to leave us and have nothing else bad happen tonight?  I said I was quite certain that we could both stay in the house tonight with nothing bad happening.  We discussed this for a couple minutes more, and then they took their leave, reminding me that if we had any more problems we should call them back.  I said something to the effect that I certainly hoped there would be no need to, and waved as they drove off.

 

Sleep well!

Placeholder for nineteenth date

I write up my nineteenth date with D here, but it actually happened back at the end of June.

Peanut allergy

Several years ago, Wife took Son 1 for allergy testing and then declared that he was allergic to peanuts. She made a great big deal of this, warning my parents, all other family members, the school … everybody within shouting distance … that he had to avoid peanuts because he was so dreadfully allergic to them that the could kill him. At the time my father responded with puzzlement, noting that he had given both boys peanut butter sandwiches for years with no ill effects. I just shrugged and stayed out of it; traditionally Wife has been responsible for all the medical decisions in our house.

But I did wonder about it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking about Münchausen syndrome by proxy. So just before his most recent testing last year, I told her that I had read somewhere that “childhood allergies often disappear over time all by themselves” (I hadn’t read any such thing, but there was method behind my fabricating it) and that I was going to want a copy of the report if Son 1 were still allergic to anything. She came back (exactly as I had imagined she would) announcing that yes indeed, all of Son 1’s allergies had cleared themselves up. Needless to add, she did not bring along a copy of the report.

But this did not satisfy my curiosity completely. Now I wanted to see the other reports. Had Son 1 ever been allergic to peanuts, or had she made up the whole thing? It took me a long time to get around to it, but I finally contacted the medical clinic and asked them to send me copies of all Son 1’s allergy tests ever. Naturally I asked them to mail me the results at work, not at home. And they arrived yesterday.

The results were not quite what I had imagined, but they were interesting all the same. There were four tests: one from 2000, one from 2005, one from 2010, and one without a date. Of those four tests, three of them showed no reaction to anything except the histamine control. Those three were 2000, 2010 [the recent one that I mentioned above], and the undated one. The test from 2005 did show allergies … and that date sounds right because it fit the age Son 1 would have been at the time. But what they showed was exactly the same level of response for peanuts, oranges [not that Wife ever had us stop feeding him oranges!], four or five different trees and grasses -- and also pure histamine. All of those irritants were scored exactly the same. Now, a little common sense tells you there has to be something wrong with the test. For an irritant to score the same as pure histamine should indeed mean (if true) that the patient had better stay away from it. If true, that state of affairs really could be cause for alarm. But if he had been that allergic to oranges, we would have seen him swell up after eating an orange or drinking orange juice. If he had been that allergic to half a dozen common trees and grasses, he would have swelled up every time the wind picked up during pollen season. And he never did any of those things. So why did the test come out that way? I have no idea, but maybe he was sick the day of the test or something like that. Certainly with results that fly so far in the face of common sense it would have been worth it to retest again in a little while – maybe a month, maybe six months, I don’t know, but something a lot more immediate than five years! And I also have to wonder, … why pick on peanuts? Why tell Son 1 that peanuts would kill him? All I can assume is that making it all a story about peanuts allowed her a measure of control: it made the story tidy and manageable, and it allowed her to indulge all her overprotective mother fantasies by bellowing at the world about how they have to be careful because otherwise a simple mistake could kill Her Son.

It’s kind of crazy.

I should tell Son 1 at some point, but I’m not sure if I should do it now or if there is any reason to wait. Heck, I should tell everybody I know that the whole exercise was a false alarm. But I know that I am not thinking clearly on this point, because I know that part of my motivation is a rather base desire to embarrass Wife and that is clouding my ability to see the whole picture. So I’d like a sanity-check from any of you. How do I communicate this?

WWDD? (What would D do ...?)

A couple of days ago, Janeway asked me for a little clarification on what I mean by "high-maintenance." Specifically, ...

Dear Hosea,
So if D travelled to Faraway City with the specific intent of seeing you and doing all the things you two normally do on your "dates", and if you were sick-ish but not really sick but didn't feel like having sex (at all), how would she react?
Sincerely, Janeway

I had to think a bit about how to answer the question, but I ended up telling a story. It went something like this:

Hmmm …. Excellent question. She’d be disappointed, of course, and at some level more than a little put out after having taken the time and spent the money to travel several hundred miles to see me. I also hope that if I were feeling out of sorts even before we got together, I would have the good grace to let her know ahead of time.

But what would she actually do? Let me try to think of some real-life examples ....

There have been individual nights (or even a couple in a row) during our longer dates when I have retreated, quiet and uncommunicative, and kept to myself as we slept. Sometimes I have been disturbed by something concrete that we were later able to discuss and resolve; other times I have just shut down over something so trivial as to be (in effect) nothing, and these are the times D talks about when she says she has to learn to deal with my depression … and that she finds it a little scary. In the moment she often responds by backing away (which is exactly the wrong thing to do); but by the next morning she is more solicitous. On the other hand that has never lasted for an entire date.

Sometimes I just haven’t gotten it up (I blame advanced middle age) but have been more than willing to hold her, to caress her, and to make love in other ways. I gather that’s not what you are talking about.

Probably the closest we ever came to what you describe was once that I never wrote about, but which was kind of a postscript to our sixth date (the second big housecleaning epic). She had travelled a long way not only to see us but to visit several other family members up and down our state. So a few days after she had left, we were talking on the phone and she said her route was bringing her back through town. (She had done some visiting up north of us, and now was headed south of us.) How about if she stopped in town for an hour on her way, got a motel room, and we spent lunchtime together?

Honestly this made me very nervous. The date that had just finished, after all, was the one where we had all driven to visit my parents, and I discovered Wife had packed a revolver in with her toiletries. Admittedly I had confiscated the revolver but I was still very scared of being seen in our own town with D, when she had supposedly left over a week ago. Oh, and I had also just confiscated Wife’s wallet and driver’s license. (Besides all this, remember that my affair with D was less than a year old at that point, and it had only been a couple of months since Wife and I had stopped having sex ... see, e.g., this story from February.) I didn’t flatly say No on the phone, however; but as I thought it over later I chickened out and texted her not to come.

You know what’s coming … she didn’t pick up her text message. I was at the office about noon and she called me on her cell phone to say “I’m here!” and give me the location of the motel. My heart jumped into my throat and I stammered out something about hadn’t she checked her cell phone for messages? No, obviously not. I explained how I had chickened out, feeling like a complete heel. She replied, a little coldly, that of course we didn’t have to make love if I didn’t feel like it, but she still wanted to see me. Plotting her route from north to south through our town had meant driving some six hours out of her way as compared to the direct route, and she would hate to have done all that extra driving for nothing. We agreed to meet at a coffee shop near the motel.

When I got there I was still feeling scared. We sat outside in the sun (“Where we are more visible!” I kept thinking) with our coffee. I don’t remember saying anything, but just staring vacantly at the table or into the middle distance … occasionally looking helplessly at D. She for her part sat with me, watching me and stroking my hair. Maybe we talked a bit, I don’t remember. And then after a while we departed. I went back to the office, and she hit the road southbound to visit more relatives. [I allude to this visit in my remarks about sunlight and coffee towards the very end of this post.]

The thing is, D has talked about that time since then as the first time she really had to face my depression in full force. And in her recollection, what she describes is always the sun reflecting off my hair and her delight in being able to spend time with me, … even under conditions of such disappointment, even doing nothing at all. I have trouble thinking of the time in this light, because to me it is a memory of a colossal failure of nerve on my part, and of a time I disappointed her acutely. But she refuses to see it that way at all, at least to judge by what she tells me. She admits it is not what she expected or planned, but she insists that she is grateful for the time together anyway.

This is one respect in which D is not simply high maintenance. Her deep religious commitments have given her a capacity for gratitude, even when she doesn’t get what she wants. Sometimes I have to wonder if she is bullshitting me, when she talks about being grateful under conditions of acute disappointment. But I have come to conclude that it’s not exactly bullshit … it’s more like a personal discipline, that especially when she is acutely disappointed she forces herself to find something in the situation to be grateful for. And then she focusses all her attention on that. It means that her long-term evaluation of what has happened is not always the same as her immediate emotional reaction. It’s also not a program that I could imagine anyone else would follow ... or at any rate not that I could expect. Your mileage may vary.

[I also realize, as I am about to post this, that this very aspect of D's character is something for which I had better be extremely grateful, because it is like a "Get Out of Jail Free" card that has rescued me any number of times that I have screwed up with her.]

Does this come anywhere near answering your question, or have I shot completely wide of the mark?

All the best,
Hosea

Aristocratic silence

A couple of weeks ago I was writing a letter to D, telling her as usual about the trivia of my day and complaining about some petty interaction with Wife, ... and suddenly as I typed I understood a huge dynamic that has been at work during the whole quarter century and more that we have been together. It blew me away. When I started one paragraph I had no idea about this, and by the time I finished I could see the thing whole and of a piece. All I can say is that sometimes in the process of explaining things I come to understand them better: that, in fact, is why I started writing this blog in the first place.

I think the easiest thing for me to do will simply be to quote my discussion from two consecutive letters, making minor adjustments for readability. I began like this: ...

My conversation with Wife this evening as we made dinner was as frustrating as usual, but not in a psychotic way … just in an "Ohmigod-how-can-you-be-so-pathetically-helpless" kind of way. (This means, of course, that if the conversation had gone on any longer I would have drunk steadily through it.) As I was grating some cheese for her (to garnish the tuna casserole – yes, tuna casserole – that she had made for dinner), she asked "Why didn’t you buy the XYZ from Costco that I had put on the shopping list?" Now in fact I had bought it, so I didn’t reply at once because I wasn’t sure quite how to. As I stayed silent she went on, "Did you even go to Costco? Were they all out? Or did you just figure that it was only for me so I should pay for it?" I found it was very difficult for me to make myself say the simple phrase, "But I did" … I don’t know why, but for years I have found that phenomenally hard. I sometimes think it is because this same conversation has played out so many times – so many times that I have done something for her which she simply has not seen, so that she then puzzles over / wonders why / accuses me of not having done it – that I scorn to enter the discussion at all. It is as if I feel that I will sully myself by stooping to set her straight, because it feels too much like whining, "I did too! Teacher, she’s being mean to me!" … or perhaps too much like fish-merchants railing at each other in stinking alleyways. It is as if I feel that, if she chooses to be so blind as not to see what I do for her, the only dignified response is to shrug and turn away with a kind of grand indifference or aristocratic disdain rather than engaging in some kind of vulgar, degrading, plebeian squabble over whether I did or didn’t do this or that trivial little thing to help her out. Of course, as I write this I see immediately that this is a self-defeating approach: what I want is for her to come to her senses and see what is in front of her, and then to have the good grace to be ashamed of herself for being so blind and self-centered, for not bothering to check before she lobs accusations right and left. And of course I realize intellectually – again, only now that I go to the trouble of writing this out – that she never will. She will just see that she asked me to do A, that (according to her own tunnel vision) I never did it, and that when she tried to follow up by asking me about it I (figuratively speaking) turned and shrugged and walked away. And how shall she read that? As proof of whatever her current vile-theory-of-the-day is about me. Of course, what else? In other words, this is not a strategy to get me what I want.

Then, a couple of nights later, I went on as follows:

I have been thinking lately that I should explain to Wife this business that I explained to you, about the "aristocratic silence" when she asks me why haven’t I done something that I really already did. The reason is that, on reflection, I have a pretty strong sense that this specific dynamic has been huge in our marriage. It probably grew out of my shyness and an unwillingness to join an argument if I didn’t have to; I think another root may even have been a high-minded disinclination to show her up as a fool for failing to see what was right in front of her face. But in any event the script works like this:

• She asks me, for instance, "Why didn’t you buy popsicles to soothe my sore throat?" when I had already bought them and put them in the freezer.




• I don’t reply, feeling on the one hand that surely any minute now she will see her mistake, and calculating on the other hand that it is even better for her to walk away with a wrong impression than for me to enter the arena over something so small.




• Well she never sees her mistake; and so she walks away with the belief that I have refused to help her, and also that I have refused even to discuss it. In other words, she walks away with the untrue and unjust belief that I have been unkind and uncaring. These four adjectives should start to sound familiar in this context. But it is something that I allowed to happen by not speaking up.

What do I mean by "calculating … that it is … better for her to walk away with a wrong impression than for me to enter the arena"? Just that I figure I can carry the weight of that small an injustice. It’s not possible to balance all the scales in life, to make every encounter or transaction perfectly fair. Often throughout the week we walk away from encounters or transactions with others where the scales didn’t line up perfectly. The thing is, sometimes they tip in our favor and sometimes in the other guy’s favor; so the reason it is not worth trying to balance them all is that overall they more or less balance out. And so we – wisely – save our effort for the big stuff. For this reason (among others, no doubt) I spent years overlooking the fact that the outcome of these specific interactions were unfairly unfavorable to me. I probably also thought I was being chivalrous by ignoring the issue. (Yes, that was pompous and self-important of me.)

What I neglected to think through was that dripping water wears away rock. Yes, I could carry the weight of any one of these events and never notice the difference (I mean events when Wife walked away thinking untrue and unjust things about me because I declined to defend myself or tell her she was being a blind fool). But this kind of interaction didn’t just happen once or twice. Wife routinely failed (and fails) to see the things I did for her. So this particular interaction probably happened closer to a thousand times. (That sounds like hyperbole, but I really don't think so when you figure in how long we have been together.) And after a thousand repetitions, what is she going to think of me? That I am a man who – on a thousand different occasions – refused to help her and refused even to discuss why I wouldn’t help her. It is no surprise that she thinks I’m a monster. And I, for my part, end up thinking that she is a woman who – on a thousand different occasions – simply could not see that I had already done something nice for her, and immediately got sharpish instead of ever once giving me the benefit of the doubt. It is no surprise that I’m as bitter as I am.

I know that this one, solitary dynamic can’t be at the root of everything; even if I had reacted differently from the very start all those years ago she would still be a narcissist, she would still hoard, she would still make shit up out of thin air, … and all the rest. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that my misguided efforts to avoid conflict, to avoid shaming her, and to avoid making myself small by "standing up for my rights" … that my misguided efforts to avoid all these things by simply tolerating the consequent injustice had the unexpected consequence of poisoning myself and poisoning the marriage. I’m not mooning over "What if?" What’s done is done. The marriage is broken irreparably. I just think it is remarkable how things turn out.

Six clues to character

A while ago -- gosh, it has been over a month -- one of the blogs run by Psychology Today posted this article about the elements that go to make up our character. I thought it was fascinating: not that all character can be defined by six dimensions, but that these specific traits should be so determinative, that they should be things you look at early to figure out what someone will be like in the long term.

Here's the list: intelligence, drive, friendship, intimacy, happiness, and goodness.

I have written before about how I really had no excuse for failing to understand who Wife was, back when I married her -- about how the data was all there in front of me and I overlooked it, perhaps out of wishful thinking, perhaps out of romance, perhaps out of obstinacy, or some combination of the above. But when I read this I wondered, What if I had known this then? Would it have helped me organize my thoughts? Probably not, of course -- wishful thinking and romance and obstinacy are all pretty powerful things. Still, it seemed a interesting exercise.

So, sticking only with things that I could have seen then (but with today's perspective on what proved important), here's what I come up with:

Intelligence: Pretty much the first thing I ever knew about Wife, back when we were first introduced, was that she belonged to Phi Beta Kappa. So that should have meant that she had the intelligence part wired. And truthfully, Wife has been pretty sharp for much of our marriage. But even then there were little signs that she was missing a kind of intellectual agility or flexibility. I remember when she told me she had been unable to balance her checkbook for months. I sat down with it and balanced it straightaway -- there wasn't anything weird in it. That may have been the first really personal service I did for her (if you leave out fucking, I mean). Or the first time we discussed politics, she asked me what political position I favored. I hesitated because this was something I thought about a lot, and I had not really worked out a political philosophy for myself that satisfied me yet. So she made it simpler by saying, "Well, at any rate are you against [a fellow who was very prominent on the political landscape back then]?" And I thought "Huh? Just 'against this guy'? Isn't that kind of a broad-brush oversimplification?" I didn't think about it much back then, because heck, she was Phi Beta Kappa wasn't she? But in retrospect it sheds light on her cartoonish misunderstandings of the emotional issues I have tried to explain over the years, not to mention less savory aspects of her character like her racism (which I had no clue about back then).

Drive: Here too I was mislead by superficialities. Wife talked a lot back then about her ambitions, and she certainly seemed a bundle of energy. If I had been asked about her drive, I would have said she had more drive than I did. But then the author quotes a psychologist in New York who says, "You want to see that [people] assess themselves in a healthy way. That includes recognizing the randomness of life. An unhealthy person rages against ill luck." And I think of the time we were walking in a nearby park and Wife was railing against some setback that had just cropped up, I no longer remember what it was. It was just the kind of random shit that could happen to anybody. And she buttonholed me, demanding "Why did this have to happen to me? Why??" ... not in a purely rhetorical way but as if that question had an answer and I should have given it to her! "Rages against ill luck" ...? Yup.

Friendship: Here too, I thought she was doing better than I was. When we met, I was a thousand miles away from the town where I had gone to college; my friends were all over. But we were in the town where she had gone to college and all her friends were still nearby; so what I saw was that she had friends around and I didn't. Plus, I knew how hard it was for me to make friends and how lonely I was, all results of my shyness. And yet, the article says, "Perhaps the strongest signal of problems in the friendship realm is the existence of cutoffs. A string of ex-friendships is a sign of rigidity, indicator of an inability to tolerate conflict or stress in relationships or work out their complexities." So what should I have thought when she told me -- with amusement, really -- that "I hold grudges close to my heart and nurture them well"? At the time I thought it was a witty remark, funny even -- and it was. But shouldn't I have paid a little more attention?

Intimacy: The article suggests you look how well your intended gets along with her/his family of origin. The answer for Wife is that her family of origin was an ongoing soap opera. I'll skip the details for now, because they would take hours. But she was still angry, deeply resentful and angry, over things that had happened years before. The article points out that not everyone has a happy childhood, but "Even a person whose early experience was less than ideal will reveal in tone and attitude—anger, wistfulness, regret—whether they've declared a truce with history." I surely had enough information to know that she hadn't declared any truces.

Happiness: Well having a girlfriend sure made me happy, and at first Wife was plenty giddy about it too. By the time we were getting married, though, I had seen plenty of what I would later understand were depressive episodes. How much importance should I have given them? I think I resisted seeing a pattern here, even though I must have known that she could be set off by little things. But also, ... remember up above, where we were walking in the park and she was so angrily and bitterly asking me "Why, why why??" When she wanted a concrete answer to why bad things always happened to her, and why her luck was always worse than anybody else's? The article goes on to say, "psychologists have come to see that in large measure [happiness] is a reflection of how we think. Cognitive behavioral therapy [or CBT, see, e.g., here or here] is founded on the fact that we consistently engage in automatic patterns of thinking about experience, of which we are generally unaware, that pitch us into positive or negative mood states. Underlying a propensity to depression are not merely encounters with adversity but assumptions about the experience and beliefs about oneself that are in fact distortions of reality." It goes on to talk about how unhealthy it is for someone to "awfullize" ... to assume the worst possible consequences from any bump in the road, and then run with them. She did that too, of course, in spades. But the point is made.

Goodness: Back then I probably would have measured "goodness" by someone's willingness to stand up for principled behavior, and I would have seen it in Wife's insistence (as a high-school teacher) on giving a student the grade he earned, even if that meant failing the star quarterback. Or I would have reached the opposite conclusion by looking at her readiness to lie. But the article talks about empathy. Did I have any occasion to judge Wife's capacity for empathy, outside of her romance with me? I'm not sure I did. Or rather, ... there were plenty of family stories about how she and her mother were always coming to the rescue of one or another of her siblings, who had gotten into an awful jam. (See my remarks above about an ongoing soap opera.) Back then I probably would have given her high marks for empathy on the stength of those stories. Now I look at them and see that their main value may have been as a way to advertise "Look how much better I am than my siblings!" But I'm sure I didn't see that then.

It probably wouldn't have made any difference if this article had been published back then or not. If I was willing to make excuses for her (which I was), I would have made them in the context of the article too. But it's still kind of an interesting exercise.

Remember, you can kind of tell these things ....

Another view of high-maintenance

Garry Trudeau is way funnier than I am. I was going to say he can summarize a whole discussion far more deftly too, and then realized that the point he makes is rather different from any of the things I've said on the same subject. But who cares? Here is Leo Deluca ("Toggle") on high-maintenance women. Lest anyone worry about copyright, let me hasten to assure you that you can find the original here: