Valentine haikus, part 2

Debbie responded a few hours later as follows.  I realize, incidentally, that she is the first girlfriend I’ve ever had who has ever written poetry back to me.

Relationship pause,

To contemplate and reflect,

Hoping for wisdom.

To honor the love

we shared over the past year,

Still appropriate.

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine haikus

In Noble Silence

The mind floods with things to say.

But no need to speak.

“Practice in motion”,

An hour, a day, even months,

Stills distracted minds.

Stillness benefits

The mind that has not focussed.

Have a happy day.

Noble silence

It’s been another week since I last posted about Debbie’s calling a halt (or at least a stay) to our relationship, and I’m starting to think she might be right.  Maybe not in every detail, but on the right path at any rate.

I didn’t come to this idea right away.  My next theory (after the one I posted last week) was actually pretty unkind: I started thinking that maybe this is par for the course.  I don’t actually know how long her other relationships have lasted; but I’ve gotten the sense that most of them – with the exception of her second marriage, that lasted twenty-something years – weren’t all that long.  Maybe a few months, or a year, or three years … in any event, I was in the process of convincing myself that I wasn’t doing all that badly by making it to the one year mark (or almost, depending on when you start counting).  As I say, it was pretty unkind … but it sure did make things easier on my ego.

And then over the weekend I realized all of a sudden how relaxed I felt that I didn’t have to be planning around someone else.  Wait – what?  Then as I tried to follow that vagrant thought, I began to see the whole picture from another angle.

There are a lot of things that I’ve been meaning to do for some time now, and haven’t done.  Hell, I still have all my books in boxes instead of having unpacked them, and I moved into my apartment more than eight months ago.  What gives?  And what’s with all the other things, maybe more serious ones: like bringing my accounting software up to date, or making a proposal to Wife for how to split our assets, or getting some idea what I want to do with my life now that it’s up to me?  I’ve dragged my feet on all of these; and while there are always “reasons” one of the big ones has been that I’ve been preoccupied with Debbie.  We’ve been doing things together, or going places together, or talking, or writing each other.  Whatever we’ve been doing, my attention has been over there, with her.  Very little of it has been back here, with myself.  Is that where I want my attention?

Well, it’s not what I’ve been telling myself.  My whole story these days is that for the last thirty years I’ve made all my decisions focussed around Wife, and now finally it’s time to explore and see what I want to be when I grow up.  Who am I when she’s not distorting the picture?  Only, … doesn’t that mean that any other intense, intimate relationship will have the same effect?  Won’t it mean just swapping one external center for another?

I think that’s why I felt kind of relieved that I didn’t have to spend the weekend thinking about what to do with Debbie, what to say or write to Debbie, how Debbie would feel about this or that.  I just didn’t.  And I almost didn’t notice that I felt relieved … but there is was, a little wisp of a vagrant thought.  And when I chased it down?  Yup, that was it.

This noticing a subtle, vagrant thought made me see the time in another way.  After all, the whole point of meditation is that with enough quiet you can start to see all the energy the mind spends making up stories for itself … and then you don’t have to be entrapped by the stories because you realize that they aren’t the same thing as reality.  So then if taking a break from each other means I can notice feelings I would otherwise have overlooked, … then this whole interlude is really a kind of meditative exercise.  A kind of meditation.  It’s longer than a normal sitting meditation.  It will last weeks, months, years, … maybe the rest of my life.  But that’s what it is.  It’s a kind of prolonged Noble Silence.

I’m not quite sure that’s what Debbie was trying to say.  But in any event it helps me see a positive side to the experience.  I don’t have to spent my time feeling glumly sorry for myself.  And that has to be a good thing.

Oh, … I tried to distill these thoughts into a couple of haikus that I’ll send her tomorrow.  I figure haikus are a better choice than sonnets, both because they are a lot easier to write and because they are less passionate … more in keeping with the whole idea of silence and reflection.

But why, part 2

I’ve heard almost nothing from Debbie in the last week – one brief e-mail Monday morning to answer one of mine over the weekend, and then total silence – but I’ve spent some more time thinking and I see what might be another contributing cause to her calling it quits.  Remember that everything I write here is shit I made up out of my own head: it’s all based on things I heard her say (or thought I heard her say), but none of it came out of her mouth viva voce.  So there’s every chance it could all be wrong.

 

But I wonder if part of her having to call it off was because the two-hour distance between us put her on an emotional roller coaster.  Say (for example) we go two weeks without seeing each other and then have a weekend together.  In that two weeks she gets pretty used to me not being around.  Then suddenly it’s Friday night, we’re together, and I’m ready to pick up at exactly the same level of intimacy where we left off.  Only Debbie can’t change gears that fast.  She feels awkward around me and spends all of Saturday re-adjusting, meanwhile nudging me subtly to back off a bit and slow down.  By Sunday morning she finally gets back to where we were last time … to where I was trying to be when I climbed out of my car Friday night.  So we spend Sunday together in the rosy halo of adoring each other.  And then Sunday evening rolls around, … and suddenly I have to climb back into my car to drive two hours back to my apartment because I have to be at work first thing Monday morning.  So then Debbie feels the pain of separation for days, like a kick in the stomach.  She pines.  She sighs.  She e-mails me, and we talk on the phone.  One way or another she suffers a lot.  But after a few days she starts to get used to me not being there, and pulls herself out of it.

 

Rinse.  Repeat.

 

When I look at it that way, I can easily believe that it would get old fast.  It also helps me understand why she kept talking as if she wanted us to be in a more quasi-married state – living together or right next door – even though consciously we both agreed that there were a bunch of reasons it was impractical for us to marry.  But after all, if I lived there then she wouldn’t have to lurch back and forth between two different emotional worlds.  She admitted early on that she’s not good at compartmentalizing, and that it’s not something she wants to get good at.  She thinks compartmentalizing is a bad way to run your life.  Only, … if you are conducting a long-distance romantic relationship, compartmentalizing is awfully useful.  It saves you a lot of pain. 

 

This evening I also realized why she might not want to communicate with me.  Remember back before we started fucking, when we were just having lunch together a lot?  We both felt this huge emotional attraction … that’s part of why, even though all her principles told her to wait a couple of years (or more), she was willing to fall into bed with me after only a couple of months.  We had that effect on each other.

 

Well, suppose that now she’s in the situation where her heart is careening back and forth between two extremes, much the way I just described above.  She decides – intellectually, I mean – that the only cure is to detach herself from me.  But the heart is never so clever as the intellect.  Her heart is probably still crashing back and forth between extremes.  So, … what’s going to happen if we start talking?  If we meet for lunch, or talk on the phone, or e-mail back and forth?  She knows perfectly well what’s going to happen, because it’s exactly what happened a year ago under the same circumstances.  Only this time she can’t allow it.  So this means avoiding the situations that could elicit that response, much as an alcoholic on the wagon stays out of bars.

 

This might be all wrong, but it makes a kind of sense.  And it means I have to be more generous in my heart towards her silence.  It may be the only thing she thinks she can do ….

 

If I still love her – which I do – I have to let her have that.

 

 

UPDATE 2023-01-10 (yes, almost 9 years later): As a supplement, see also this post here. 

 

But why?

Ever since Debbie left Wednesday night, I have been trying to figure out why.  Oh, I know what she told me: that I have psychological work to do to recover from my last relationship … in reality my last two, I suppose, if you want to count both Wife and D.  That as long as I am married to Wife, even if it is purely de jure, it will tie up my energy in ways that make me not fully available to her.  And that there are social norms against a single woman carrying on with a married man.

 

Now I’ve conceded that maybe I have neuroses that have to be addressed somehow.  I wish I knew what they were, but I can’t rule out the possibility.  As for my energy being tied up, … well, maybe that was Debbie’s experience when she divorced.  I think a certain amount of my energy will always be tied up with Wife regardless of our legal status, because we have children together.  But then Debbie still talks about her ex-husband too, and checks Facebook to see what he and his new wife have posted there recently.  She has made a point, several times, of telling me (unasked, more or less out of the blue) that the two of them seem to be a good match for each other because they both drink heavily, that of course she doesn’t disapprove because they don’t seem to be hurting anyone and it’s not her place to have an opinion about how much they drink, and that she has completely outgrown the uncomfortable space she used to live in where she felt that his drinking reflected on her.  And so on.  (There’s generally more.)  Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think my own energy is a lot more tied up with Wife than that.

 

And then there is this concern about social norms, which just sounds absurd to me.  Debbie said, “Well maybe you don’t get it, but other people do. When we met all your relatives a couple weekends ago, I’m sure they would all get it.”  But of course they all know that I’m still legally married to Wife, and they welcomed Debbie with open arms.  So I can’t help thinking that’s an excuse.

 

An excuse to cover what, though?  What made her so uncomfortable that she had to call it off?  I’ve spent some time remembering things Debbie said here and there over the past year, and I have two theories.

 

The weaker theory is that, … well, she’s currently living and going to school two hours away from here and she spends a lot of time socializing with the people in her program.  Maybe she’s interested in one of them and wants to get closer to him but figured she couldn’t as long as she was involved with me.  And so maybe she decided that either I was going to take clear steps to where I could be only hers, or else I wasn’t offering her enough for her to pass up this other guy.  She’s never said anything quite that clear, of course.  But I’ve listened carefully when she has talked about her friends in the program, and at different times it has sounded like she is getting pretty close to one or another.  And the first weekend she spent here after moving, she waited until Sunday night and then said we had to have a long talk about “exclusivity”.  Later she said that wasn’t what she had meant at all, that it had just come out badly because she was tired and confused.  But naturally I have to allow for the possibility that maybe “exclusivity” is exactly what was on her mind, and then later she just decided to backpedal and obfuscate.  Debbie has said that she can’t be involved with more than one person at a time.  So that’s one possibility.

 

The other theory – the one that I currently think is more interesting and more likely – is that she just found herself feeling too nervous in the relationship.  Several times when we were first getting together she said that our relationship – even before it was sexual – was bringing up a lot of strong emotions for her, and she had to back down because they frightened her.  She said that when she was growing up she learned to associate strong emotions with being unsafe: her dad drank, her parents were violent to each other, and she herself did recklessly unsafe things when she was in the grip of strong emotions.  Later on, she told me that for a while she had contemplated entering a nearby Buddhist monastery as a nun, because the communal lifestyle appealed to her so much.  She picked up this theme of communal lifestyle later when she said it bothered her that I wasn’t part of any of her other circles of friends … and then she expanded on this to say that she found it very comfortable to meet her social needs in community – in circles of friends, or (presumably) in a monastery – but that the sheer intensity of a head-on, one-on-one relationship made her very nervous. 

 

And do you remember back when I talked to her about the idea that we pick out people like our parents to marry?  She could easily identify that her ex-husband (to whom she was married for twenty-five cool and passionless years) was a lot like her mother: proactive, decisive, matter-of-fact, reliable, ethical, but emotionally cold with no spark of divine fire making his blood leap and his spirit soar.  She could pick out several other lovers who fit the same profile.  But she had a very hard time placing me until I pointed out that I – much like her first husband (with whom she stayed only a year or so) – came close to fitting the way she described her father: emotionally warm, even passionate, but also more likely to be passive.  Her father is the one who drank himself to death.  Her father is the one who would rage at her mother when he was drunk, prompting Debbie to hop out her bedroom window and run down the block to sleep at a friend’s house.  (To be fair, apparently Debbie’s mother held her own in fighting back; but this made the house an unsafe place to be, and Debbie blamed her father for it. After listening to enough of her stories, I think I can see how he got to that place – a few years ago I might have been headed that direction with Wife. But that’s a digression.) 

 

So I wonder if it was the very intensity of our love, accentuated by the long gaps between seeing each other, that finally scared her off?  It was less than two weeks ago, after all – when we got back from the weekend visiting my aunt and uncle, after I left her apartment to drive home – that she texted me, “Hi Hosea, will you please text me when you get home to let me know you arrived? I’m feeling the same gut-wrenching feeling of missing you that I feel when [my daughter] leaves after [we’ve had] several days together. Love you.”  Whatever you call that, it’s not indifference.  It may have been just too much turmoil.

 

It’s always dangerous trying to explain someone in terms that are very different from how she explains herself.  It means thinking that I understand her better than she understands herself (or at least better than she is willing to discuss), and that’s an arrogant thing to say.  Moreover there’s a huge posibility of self-delusion.  Maybe the truth is really just exactly what she said it was.  If I can’t bring myself to understand or believe it, maybe that’s just my problem.

 

Still, I can’t help but wonder.

 

 

 

Debbie's gone

It’s Wednesday night, though I suppose this won’t post till Thursday.  And I don’t know how much of this I have the heart to write.  But I had better mark the day, at least.

Debbie was in town today.  We agreed to meet at my apartment after work, to cook dinner.  When she arrived, she brought a bunch of things for dessert too … sweet and very tasty.  So we cooked dinner together, spending an hour chit-chatting about what’s going on in her life and in mine.  Then finally we sat down with some food, to talk about what’s going on with us.

I’m not going to try to trace the whole conversation.  But she said her therapist told her, “In every relationship there comes a point, between three months and a year into it, when it becomes real.”  We’d had various sticky spots, and she had tried to decide what among them was important and what not.  She decided that two points were critical: then, if we could meet on these, she could let the rest go. 

First, she thinks I have a lot of psychological work to do still before I recover from being married to Wife.  Bad habits buried deep.  Dysfunctional reactions etched into my soul.  That kind of thing.  For her it took many years and a lot of therapy to get free of her baggage; she says even if it takes me less time than that, it’s still way too early for me to be starting a new intimate relationship.

Second, she decided that she really can’t be involved with me while I am still married to Wife.  Partly because it will tie up my “energy” in ways I may not even see or understand.  And partly because there are social norms against that sort of thing.  She actually used the words “social norms.”

I told her I can understand the first point – that is, no, actually I don’t understand it at all but I can imagine what it would be like to understand it.  I can imagine what it would be like to be involved with somebody whose head was all twisted around, and to want to say, “Look, get your head on straight and then call me.”  I can imagine that.  So while I don’t really have any idea what she thinks is batty about me, what neuroses she wants me to process, I’m not going to argue with that one.

I cannot understand taking “social norms” that seriously.  Sorry, but I just can’t.  I won’t argue in the sense that she has to decide where her boundaries are and I can’t decide for her.  But that one I just don’t get.  At all.

And in any event, that one’s the dealbreaker.  Because as near as I can tell the future – and I admitted that I am notoriously bad at it – divorcing Wife just ain’t gonna happen.  For all the reasons I explained to you in my last post.  I told Debbie that if I did agree to her terms, then that is the point at which she should break it off, because it would mean that I was faithless and cruel.

She was just sad and quiet.  We both were.  Because it was clear to both of us that this meant it was over.

Finally I asked her, “Didn’t I tell you all of this before, months ago?”

“Yes, you did. Back when we first got together.”

“Well then … what did you think I was going to say now?”

“I didn’t know.”

“How could you not know?”

“I just didn’t.”

“If I thought you were that devious, I’d think you did this on purpose so you could find a way to break up with me that would be face-saving on both sides.”

“I understand why it could look like bait-and-switch to you. I’m sorry. But I think we both have to be true to ourselves.”

I still don’t know what that means.  I still don’t get why a woman who has had two husbands and well over a handful of lovers – a woman who has lived abroad in a dozen countries and is starting her third career – can be so intimidated by “social norms”.  I just don’t get it.

We finished dinner and dessert.  We cleared the table.  She gave me back her copy of the key to my apartment.  I gave her back my copy of the key to her condo.  We both said that we wanted to keep the friendship, but that we were both too sad to trust our emotions right now to figure out how to do that.  We kissed – a long, torrid, passionate kiss that went on and on.

And then she left.

I feel numb.  I have no idea how I’ll feel tomorrow, or next week.  I don’t even really want to drink, though I’ve had just a little bourbon to sip as I write this.

I just don’t get it.

It's complicated

The other thing my friend asked me after the lecture Sunday afternoon is how the relationship with Debbie is going.  He and his wife knew Debbie and her ex-husband years ago, when their daughters were taking violin lessons together, or something like that.  Anyway he knows us both and thinks it’s a great match.

 

The only thing is, I didn’t know what to tell him.  It’s complicated.  Actually, it’s been a complicated month.

 

Christmas seemed OK.  You remember that I had custody of the boys through the afternoon of December 24, that we stayed with my parents, and that we had a virtual Christmas there on the 22nd.  The next day, Debbie stopped by to visit.  She brought presents for my parents and the boys (books all around).  We had some coffee and cake and then ordered out for dinner.  The boys felt a little awkward around her, or so it seemed, but otherwise it went fine.

 

On Christmas Eve I delivered the boys to Wife’s place.  Debbie’s mother had invited me for Christmas Day, so I drove there next, arriving late for supper but in time to follow Debbie to her hotel nearby where we tucked ourselves all snug in the bed and watched for visions of sugarplums.  Christmas morning we opened presents at Debbie’s mother’s house, along with Debbie’s daughter and her husband, plus other assorted family.  We ate too much dinner, then ate too much dessert, then ate too much again.  As they say, Christmas comes but once a year. 

 

The last Sunday of the year, Debbie and I entered a week-long silent retreat held a few miles away by a noted Buddhist teacher who does this sort of thing.  If you had asked me a year ago whether I would expect to spend (part of) the Christmas season in a week-long, silent, Buddhist meditation retreat, I would have looked at you funny or asked what you had been smoking.  But Debbie was full of good things to say about this teacher, and other people that I have met (in the almost-a-year that I have been meditating) have told me they’ve found a lot of value in silent retreats.  Besides, Debbie paid the registration fee so how could I say No?

 

It was interesting, and I’ll probably do it again some day.  But by the end of the retreat I found the long silence had made me more sensitive than usual and therefore touchier.  As we drove back to civilization, Debbie and I found we weren’t connecting quite right.  We talked for a while after getting to her apartment, before I drove on to mine, but somehow couldn’t click.  There had been no sex during the retreat, and now we weren’t synchronized enough for it.  (Though honestly, I think fucking might have put us back on track.)

 

We talked over the next couple of weeks – saw each other, took in a couple of movies, e-mailed as usual – but still it seemed a little off.  Then in mid-January we took a four-day weekend that we had planned a couple of months ago, to visit several of my relatives in another state.

 

The drive there was difficult and we seemed to spend too much time misunderstanding each other.  The visit itself was great fun.  Debbie connected with my relatives on many different levels at once, so it was easy and natural and pleasant.  I wondered if maybe we were finally getting back to where we belonged.

 

Then the night before we left to come home, Debbie told me she wanted to go back to being “just good friends” … like we were the first month or two, when we got together for meals but not sex.

 

What’s this about?  I have no idea, and so far we haven’t taken the time for her to explain it.  What she said is that she feels funny knowing that I am still married, and that she has come to the conclusion that the relationship “won’t work” for her unless she knows I am on a definite path towards a divorce, towards being “free”.

 

But free for what?  To marry her instead?  Ain’t gonna happen.  I’ve been resolute in saying that I can’t see the long-term future one way or another, but I’ve also said that it’s clear to me in the short term (all the future I can see) I don’t want to be married again.  Nor quasi-married.

 

And divorce?  I thought I’d been pretty clear about that too.  I made a deal with Wife that if we could stay out of Court then I’d settle for separation instead of divorce, so that she can keep my medical insurance.  She has kept her part of the deal, so I have to keep mine.  Does Debbie want me to welsh on it?  Really?  Because the way I treat Wife should be an indicator how I’ll treat her if things ever go south between us.

 

Besides, depriving Wife of medical insurance – I mean, gratuitously depriving her of medical insurance – would be pointlessly cruel.  Is that what Debbie wants?  Again, really?  I would have thought that seeing me be needlessly cruel would be a motive for her to run the other direction.  Because the way I treat Wife … oh right, I already said that.

 

Anyway, it ain’t gonna happen.  If Wife keeps her part of the deal, I’ll keep mine … for both those reasons.  Debbie must not be thinking, or must have forgotten.

 

Or else she remembers perfectly, and that’s her point.  Maybe what she really meant is not, “I want you to divorce Wife so you can marry me,” but rather, “I want to dump you but in a way that doesn’t crush your ego, so I’m going to ask for conditions that I know you’ll never agree to. That way it looks like it’s your choice to end it, and I’m off the hook without having to say bluntly that I wanted out.”

 

On the whole I don’t think Debbie is devious enough for that.  She forgets other simple things, so I’m willing to believe she’s just spacey and inattentive.

 

On the other hand, the whole point of mindfulness meditation is supposed to be that it makes you more attentive, and she’s practiced it steadily for fifteen years.  Maybe she is really every bit as attentive as she needs to be.  Maybe she just wants out.

 

I’m puzzled, and it’s complicated.