The challenge of getting to know you

Last month, as D and I were on our way to the airport at the end of our eighteenth date, the conversation flagged for a while. D obviously felt funny about the silence, and so started asking me questions, seemingly at random: Do you have any activities planned for Son 1 this summer? Will he be pursuing an exercise regimen to keep in shape for sports? How are you going to pay for private school next year? Do you have any plans for the summer with friends in town? How many of the parents at Son 2’s school have you been able to get close to? Or were you closer to the parents at the primary school both boys used to attend? I guess that the parents of Son 2’s best friend, Sherry and Martin [those are the parents], were maybe your closest friends there, is that right? And so on. This didn’t have the result she was looking for, however, because after each question I got quieter and more sullen. Finally she gave up and we drove in quiet most of the rest of the way to the airport.
In an e-mail not long after, D wrote to me, …

I did want to say that I’m sorry I asked so many silly, non-important questions at the end of our brief stay together in Faraway City, which made me seem like I was just fishing for something—anything—to say and which bored you. I am still struggling with accepting your depression and moodiness without becoming alarmed or nervous. I certainly don’t mean to babble on about nothing and I realize how tiring that kind of behavior can be…I have many more interesting things to say (I hope) and I can also remain silent without discomfort if I am feeling confident. I’m learning; please be patient with me.

Hmmm, … well. Somehow that didn’t sound quite right, so I tried to feel my way around what sounded wrong with it. My reply went, in part, like this:

About all those questions at the end of our stay, please don’t take fright. Also, “bored” doesn’t really capture my reaction. It’s more that … gosh, how can I explain this?

• At one level I had trouble just figuring out the correct answer to some of what you asked. For example, were we close to Son 2’s friend’s parents? It depends what you mean by “close.” Certainly I was comfortable going over there and chatting with Sherry or Martin for some hours while the kids played, and I would have felt a lot more awkward doing that with the parents of any of their other friends. But there is another definition of “close” where I feel like maybe I have to say, “Ummm, gosh, … we both know I’m cripplingly shy; how close can I get to anyone?” That’s one level.
  


• At another level, I started to feel like your questions all related to things I should have done and hadn’t, like making concrete plans for the summer; so I began to feel the fingertips of Failure crawling up my back as I reflected on all these missed opportunities or obligations.
  


• And at a third level, I guess a lot of questions in a short time just left me feeling … I don’t know, confused or at a loss. It’s not like you were asking me, “Where were you on the night Mrs. McGillicudy was stabbed? Isn’t it true that you have no credible alibi?” But I did begin to feel a little bit at sea. Too much, too fast, as it were.

In any event, I know you didn’t intend any of this, so don’t fret over it. Apology is superfluous because the forgiveness is in place before the words are spoken. It’s just that you are still getting used to my cycles of ebullient talk alternated with inarticulate quiet. I get that. It takes time to get used to anything. So it’s OK, really ….

Her reply back to me made a distinction that I hadn’t seen before:

You must realize that when I apologize for being awkward, as i did after my silly questions at the airport, I'm not really 'blaming myself' for some wrong deed. Rather, our language seems to lack the proper way to acknowledge the very real challenge of getting to know another person; I want to learn the purity of your spirit, the refinement of your mind, the delight of your humor, your rising and falling moods, your dearest hopes and desires. What we have together is set against the typical, youth-oriented vision of 'falling in love' because loving you seems more akin to organic growth, so deep and so subtle as to have surprised us both. There is, of course, no 'one love' for a person; we have both loved others. And yet...there is something so fine and so deep and true about our love…. I believe we might be wise if we recognized that it is not easy to love well, and even that not everyone has an endless capacity to grow in this area.

The flattery was enchanting, of course; but I was particularly taken by her re-framing of the words “I’m sorry.” I think she is on to something. And it can be hard to get to know someone, even when you both love each other to pieces ….

Milk, eggs, antacid, and helplessness

It's been a long time since I posted much. No idea why, but I guess I've just been pre-occupied: with work, with home, with drinking myself to sleep at nights, ... that sort of thing. But when I look at some of the stories I've been telling D in my letters to her, they would work perfectly here.

About three weeks ago, for instance -- just after I got back from the trip that included my eighteenth date with D -- Wife picked a fight with me. I don’t remember how it started or how she slid into it, nor can I do a very good job of recounting the sequence of ideas or themes. I think this is because there really were no ideas, just a succession of feelings -- all of them wounded, self-pitying, and self-absorbed. The gist seems to be that I am a beast who is trying to kill her because I didn’t buy milk before I left on this latest trip. Of course that’s not enough by itself -- in fact I "never" buy milk, and I "never" pay my share of it if she buys it, and her body weight is too low which means she needs a higher-protein diet than she can possibly get if I cook vegetarian which I "always" do these days so obviously I have failed to understand that it is "a matter of life and death" that she has to eat differently than I have been cooking, and if I "cared about her at all, even a tiny bit" I wouldn’t want her to die of malnutrition so I would start cooking differently, … and on and on and on. Any connection with the facts in all this was purely coincidental; and in fact most of the things she alleged as fact are simply not true. Nor was there the slightest suggestion that she might take any responsibility at all for her own well-being. I did finally suggest that I couldn’t take her ranting very seriously because … well gosh, she said this was all because I failed to buy milk? And she said she has to have milk regularly as a source of protein, because otherwise she’ll lose too much body mass and die? And yet … somehow not once in the whole week I was gone was it important enough for her to swing by the store on the way back from some other errand and pick up a bottle of milk? Have I got this right? There was a lot more drama before she decided to drive out to the store right then and there to buy some milk. That would prove me wrong, by golly! Still more drama, all the way out to the car. As she pulled away and I walked back inside, Son 2 said, "OK now, I just heard all of that and this family is fucking disintegrating. Over milk??"

After she got back from the store she tried to pick up the thread of the argument and to have the last word in it. Meanwhile I had made dinner and put it on the table. She continued to light into me at the table, until Son 2 interposed by demanding a moratorium on fighting until after dinner was over. After dinner I had a couple more shirts to iron; and when Wife came back into the back room I told her she cannot say anything more about any of this being an issue of life and death. "If you truly believe that the way I cook -- or staying in the marriage generally -- poses a risk to your life, then you have to get out: go to a shelter, call the police, call an attorney, file for divorce, but in any event don’t try to argue with me about it. On the other hand if you are not prepared to do those things, then you don’t really believe your life is at stake and so you have to stop saying it." Of course this just sparked more excuses and equivocations, but fortunately she was tired and fell quickly back to sleep.

Oh wait, I just remembered there was a whole stretch about how I was too controlling and made up too many rules she had to obey; also about how unfair it is that she can never make her budget balance when the "only" thing she buys outside of her share of normal household expenses is $10 a month of Diet Coke. There was somehow no mention of her car in this part of the discussion (a luxury car that is just hers so she pays for all its expenses), and only a glancing reference to all the "medical" marijuana she has been buying. And so it goes.

That was on a Sunday night. The next morning, Wife called me at work, on my cell phone, to ask “Why did you cross antacid tablets off the shopping list?” (I’m sure she figured she could work this up into a lather, kind of like last night’s tempest over buying milk.)

“Because we have lots of them.”

“Well the jar in my medicine cabinet is almost out, so I don’t know where you think they are.”

I sighed to myself. The next two jars of antacid tablets were in the cupboard in the hallway where we have always kept all that sort of thing -- shampoo, toothpaste, soap, and over-the-counter remedies -- and they were positioned obviously front and center. It would have been impossible to open the cupboard door and not see them. But this was so obvious and would have been so easy for anybody else to have found that I couldn’t make myself spit out the words. Instead I said, …

“Look around in the obvious places, and if you still can’t find them by the time I get home I’ll help you look.”

“OK.”

In case you were wondering, the antacid tablets were still there in the cupboard in the hallway last night, some eighteen days later.

Then that same Monday, over dinner in the evening, she complained that I hadn't bought sandwich meat. More specifically, she told me: first, that she had told her nutritionist she eats eggs every morning for breakfast (and he congratulated her because they will put weight on her); and then second, that of course she could have eggs for lunch since I hadn't bought sandwich meat, but they would be boring after having had them for breakfast. So I was amused to realize Tuesday morning (as I made breakfast for myself and Son 2) that I was looking at the very same carton of eggs we had bought before I left town, so that she cannot possibly have eaten a single egg in the preceding week and a half or longer, except for one hard-boiled egg I put into dinner a couple nights earlier. Not one. So where does all this talk about eggs come from? Your guess is as good as mine. I wonderrd, though, whether she realized that she was fabricating these stories?

A couple days later I raised the issue. I told her that I was uncomfortable with her actively pursuing nutritionists (as she has been doing recently), because she is lying about what she eats: so if they start prescribing something to put weight on her (she says she is at about 108 lbs right now) in the belief that she is already eating a good diet (such as all those mythical eggs) and she isn't, they will be mis-prescribing. I expected her to blow up the way she would have once upon a time, demanding to know how dare I question her veracity (even though I can count how many eggs we still have) etc etc. I was impressed that instead she said yes, that was right, she hadn't eaten any eggs recently. For a while she was in the habit of it and she must have been speaking out of habit when she told her nutritionist she was eating eggs rather than remembering what she had actually eaten recently. OK, that's still not good, but as answers go it is miles ahead of the angry, aggressive, psychotic craziness she used to bellow out before whenever she was caught in a flat-out untruth. Maybe her work with Counselor to improve how she talks to people is actually bearing fruit.

But the overt helplessness still concerns me.

Is this what I love about high-maintenance women?

Just today I found the Heartless Bitches International website. I'd never heard of it before, but on the Internet you can find pretty much anything if you look long enough.

Sure enough, there is an essay posted here by some guy I have (also) never heard of before, about "Why I Date Heartless Bitches Instead of Nice Girls."

It may not be the whole story by itself ... in some moods Wife would have aspired* to heartless-bitchdom ... but it's a great start.

* "aspired to" but probably not made it.

Narcissism is being eliminated?

A couple of weeks ago, D sent me the following bit of information:

The next edition of the DSM will eliminate narcissistic
personality as a disorder. That's because it has become so ordinary. Yet the
Mayo Clinic Web site notes: "When you have narcissistic personality
disorder...you may belittle or look down on people you perceive as
inferior...you may insist on having the best of everything--the best car,
athletic club, medical care or social circles." What is certain is that altruism
is impossible; a certain contempt for others is glorified. I see this so clearly
in Wife's treatment of you; her manipulation of you and indifference to your
emotions and feelings is symptomatic of a disorder that, left undiscussed and
untreated, threatens to undermine the very fabric of community.

Gosh, really? Can a whole diagnosis simply disappear, just because everyone suffers from it? Somehow that sounds a little bit like asking, "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, are you the one who is certifiably nuts by refusing to jump too?"

And has anybody told Alone about this, over at The Last Psychiatrist? Just wondering what he'll find to write about, if narcissism up and disappears ....

Eighteenth date: Follow-on story

There's a part of the story of my eighteenth date with D that I neglected to write up at the time. Fifteen years later, I have finally written it. Naturally there is a chance that some of the details might be a little foggy at this point, but I'm pretty sure the gist of the story is solid.

You can find it here.

      

Eighteenth date

So soon? Well, yes. A week after I got home from Faraway City I had to fly out there again for another week. This time D was able to join me only Friday evening, after I had spent the week pretty solidly working (at the office in the day and writing up reports at night). We left again Saturday evening, so we didn't have a lot of time together. I probably wouldn't mention it at all if I hadn't gotten into the habit by now of writing about every single date we have. But I don't think I have a lot new to report.

But there is a little news. D has a new job starting in the fall -- she's been offered a position at another school several states away from where she lives now, a place whose administration seems to have its head on straight. That would make a welcome change, and she accepted the job on the spot without any thought how she is going to move this summer. So far the only people at school that she has told are her colleague Rog and her single favorite student (only because he was in the room when she got the call). Her favorite student, who is graduating this year, told her he was really glad she got this other offer because he had been planning all year to write her a long essay on his way out the door about why she simply had to get out of the school she's at today, because the environment is toxic in a dozen ways, and because it is run by crazy people. Now, he said, he wouldn't have to write the essay, and that was a big relief.

When D told her husband about this new job, and about how she would have to move even farther away from "their" house than she lives right now, he said he wanted to go with her. His work can be done anywhere he has access to the Internet, so location is no big deal. And he wanted them to move back in together, because he missed living with her. She pondered this for a while and then told him that her one condition before agreeing to this was that she wanted an open marriage -- meaning specifically the freedom to fuck other people (presumably meaning me). Her husband pondered this in turn, but finally agreed.

I'm not completely sure I understand what is going on between the two of them right now. D says she told her husband that the sexual part of their life together is certainly over, but she also says that he admitted to missing it. I don't know if she is just being high-handed with him, or if the reality is simply more complex. (I assume that it pretty much has to be complex, given that they've been married even longer than I have been to Wife.) In any event, she did say that he agreed to the open marriage. I suspect he won't be moving with her this summer, because it will likely take longer than that to pack up their stuff and sell the house. But perhaps in a while.

For what it is worth, this new job will put her several states closer to Faraway City. Of course, she may have less freedom to get up and vanish for a couple of days, in a brand-new job and all.

D remarked also that she mentioned this "open marriage" discussion to her daughter, whom I introduced in one post under the name "D Jr" or "Brittany". Her daughter replied that she saw two sides -- two forces, even -- inside her mother, fighting for supremacy. On one side there is D's deep, conservative religiosity; her obsessive workaholism; her austere, almost ascetical Jansenism. But on the other side, D Jr said she sees a longing for joy and beauty and freedom that seems to be pushing towards a goal that maybe is not even visible yet. And of course D herself is aware of this struggle too, painfully so every time she reflects that she no longer understands how she can go to church regularly while still involved with me. (I am reasonably sure that I haven't helped any with my occasional suggestions that there must be some way for her to see ecstatic sex as a component of a spiritual path.) One way or another, she is feeling a lot of transition in her life right now.

There's not really a lot of narrative to this date, though. (Dinner, sex, sleep, sex, coffee, sex, breakfast, walking and talking, used bookstore, airport.) Well, unless you count how difficult the flight back home was. Maybe I'll save the details of that story for another time. For the moment, suffice it to say that I must have had rocks in my head when I booked my itinerary through ... well, let's call it a major urban hub that has way more than its share of bad weather and consequent air travel delays. I did finally get home, at something like 2:15 in the morning, hours after I was expected. Maybe I'll remember and book my next trip along a different route.

A joke from Son 1

The last time he was home, Son 1 told me a joke he said he had heard recently. Right away he disclaimed any responsibility for it -- "I heard this from some guy in my dorm" -- which probably makes sense, all things considered. The entire joke consists of a simple observation:

When a girl says she went through a whole box of tissues watching a movie -- and when a guy says the same thing -- they are talking about very different kinds of movies.

Yes indeed, Son 1 is fourteen years old and in high school. Where else? And yet, I haven't quite been able to get past wondering at the incongruity here: Is my kid really telling me this joke? Really? Something a little odd there, even if I can't quite put my finger on it ....