Romance or community?

I'm starting to slip on this "Post once a day" goal I set myself, but maybe I can catch up.  I was thinking of posting my last dream of last night, just before I woke up this morning, but that seemed just a bit too desperate.  Surely I can think of more material than that.  Well I have thought of a couple other topics, actually, but I think they'll take a while to flesh out and I'm trying to write this on my lunch hour.  So I'll have to try for something shorter.

One thing I have mulled over recently, though, is a comment Debbie made to me last fall, in an e-mail where she was (even then) feeling her way through some of her mixed feelings about our relationship.  She said that on the whole she preferred to meet her own social needs "in community" rather than in a romantic relationship, because in her experience intense personal relationships were always unsafe.  She instanced, for example, her relationship with her parents when she was growing up: her mother was emotionally unavailable, and her father (by the time she was an adolescent) was drinking and violent.  And at the time she used this as a springboard for talking some more about us.

What I have been mulling, though, is this distinction: romance or "community"?  What does it really mean, and what are the differences between the two?  I take "community" in this case to refer to a circle of friends.  Certainly Debbie talked often about belonging to several interlocking communities: a couple of sanghas, her church community, her coworkers, ... maybe some others.  Now that she is enrolled in a chaplaincy program and has moved to another city, she's got a new church, a new sangha (or two), her fellow students, an Al-Anon group ... in short, multiple interlocking communities.  And this is how she most enjoys meeting her needs for sociability, for companionship.

It's a bit of a foreign concept for me, because I don't plunge myself into communities in the same way.  I get along comfortably with all the people at work, but there is maybe only one with whom I am partway down the path of making him a friend in the sense that we talk about our private lives.  I have been a steady member of the UU sangha for close to a year now -- maybe even a little more -- and I guess I'm settling into that.  I helped out at an event last weekend where the sangha volunteered to do something nice for the UU church that hosts us, and I was able to ask a member of the sangha to drive me home after my colonoscopy a couple months ago.  But I see the people there at sangha, and not outside of it.  So I don't really have anything like the extended network of friends that Debbie has, and that she makes a point of having around her at all times.

Probably I shouldn't even try to speculate about the differences between these two ways of being sociable, when I don't have the experience of her way.  But I can't help wondering about it.  Somehow it seems to me that it is easier to put on an act for the members of a "community" than for a romantic partner, to pretend to be a better person than you are.  Somehow it seems to me that, for good or ill, you have to be more honestly yourself in a romantic relationship -- at any rate, once the rose-colored fog burns off -- because you get closer to each other and (try to) tear down all the barriers in between.  I might be wrong.  Maybe if you live "in community" the way Debbie does you get so close to people that you can't hide behind niceness.  Maybe what I'm really thinking of is that it's easier to put on an act with strangers.  And she's not talking about strangers.  But my coworkers aren't exactly strangers to me.  They aren't strangers, but I'll wager they don't know most of my faults.

I guess I don't really know how to compare these two ways of being sociable.  Maybe I should mull them some more.  But I've told you my first thought.    

Why do I have no Internet connection?

In a roundabout way, this topic is linked with the last one.  It's still Sunday night as I type this, and I hope I have less to say because the last post (about drinking) took me an hour or more.  But let me try to crank this out quickly.  [For whatever it's worth, I didn't finish it until Monday night. Oh well.]

When I took possession of my apartment, almost a year ago by now, I made appointments to turn on the gas and the electricity.  Water and trash are included in the rent.  I decided not to install a phone line because I've got a cell phone, and why exactly do I need two phones?  (Wife has a land line as well as her cell phone, but I've never once claimed that Wife's spending makes any logical sense.)  I don't own a television, so I didn't bother to connect cable.  And I did not set up Internet service.  To this day I haven't.

This irritates the boys no end, when they come to stay with me.  I often have to go to work during the day, leaving them to entertain themselves until I can get away and come home.  For Son 2 this usually means reading.  But Son 1 owns a laptop (Son 2 doesn't), so his idea of entertainment is to surf the Web.  Bad news dude – Dad doesn't have an Internet connection.  Can't do that.  So he plays downloaded games instead; if both of them are here at the same time, they may entertain each other or go for a walk around town or something.  (At least once last year Son 1 went out to the movies.)  But I never fail to hear from them that "At least Mom has an Internet connection – unlike some people!"  It has almost become a running joke.  I think they chalk it up to my being stingy.  (Wife has long told anyone who will sit still to listen how stingy I am. For my part I think she spends at delusional levels. Maybe we're both right.)

But really, why don't I have an Internet connection in my apartment?

I've thought about it.  In some ways it would be convenient: for example, I could post these blog entries when I write them instead of having to queue them for later.  I could check movie times without having to get a newspaper.  Maybe I'd finally get my photos from Peru posted online where the family can see them – or at any rate I could do a lot of other things without having to pack up my computer and walk to the public library where the wifi is free.  I could check my e-mail from the comfort of my own apartment ....

But wait.  Check my e-mail?  Do I want to be able to do that all the time?  If I can then pretty soon I'm expected to; pretty soon I have to.  If I'm plugged in all the time, then I'll have to be plugged in all the time.  Work will be able to find me.  Friends and family will be able to find me.  Human contact is great, of course; I'm not knocking it.  But there's a reason we don't live at the office.  And there's a reason it's nice to have "a place of your own" ... even if it's not much, or even if (like me) you don't want it to be much because you don't want to have to take care of it.  Sometimes you just gotta get away, and not having Internet at home is a great excuse.

There's more.  I know how seductive the Intnernet can be.  More times than I could count have I gone online to look up one little fact, then seen an interesting link and followed it up, ... and by the time I come to myself three or four hours have passed.  My eyes are a little glazed, my mind is a little dazed, my soul is not a bit refreshed ... and yet somehow a large chunk of my day has slipped through my fingers never to return.  Thich Nhat Hanh is right to refer to the Internet under the aspect of alcohol or a drug: it induces the same forgetfulness, it nudges with the same compulsiveness, and it gives nothing back in return.  It buys your life and pays with ashes.  You'd think that with this opinion I'd never use the Internet except for a defininte purpose, that I'd be as vigilant about Internet usage as I try to be about alcohol, ... that I could make it not be a problem.  But I'm not so sure.  At the very least, I don't trust myself to do this.  (You notice I haven't given up drinking either.)  So instead I just make it difficult to access.  Yes, I can connect to the Internet over the weekend, but to do it I have to drive into the office, or walk to the Library, or at least find a Starbucks somewhere.  I have to take conscious, deliberate steps.  And that slows me down.  It makes it less likely that I will piss away my weekend and not even get the delicious feeling of laziness in return.

This means I'm depriving myself of one of the drugs that could distract me from anxiety, but I find myself of two minds about this.  One side says, "Good. If you're anxious then deal with the anxiety rather than covering it up by surfing the Web."  Interestingly the other side agrees about the prescription (no Internet) but for the opposite reason: it says, "Internet browsing may distract you from your anxiety; but unlike booze or food or sex, it does not alleviate it."  When I'm done, I am just as anxious as I was before ... maybe a little more so.  This is what I mean by saying that I'm not refreshed.  It's kind of like eating cardboard – it keeps the jaws busy, but when I stop to pay attention I realize there's no flavor and it doesn't really make me feel any better.  If I'm going to feel the low-level chronic anxiety anyway, I'd rather live in the real world while I'm doing it ... surrounded by real, tangible objects with real colors and textures, and feeling real honest-to-God boredom rather than some cheap ersatz  imitation of interest.

Of course not everybody feels this way.  But if you've ever read Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

And I suppose I should add that this is a general comment about the medium.  If some of you start writing again, I promise to make an exception for you.  I'll still have to do it from the Library on weekends, though.

Why do I drink?

Actually I think I've talked about this some, haven't I?  But I was thinking about it Saturday and then never wrote anything Saturday.  (Shame on me.)  Now it's Sunday evening, and I thought I'd knock this out quickly before turning in.

There are actually things I don't like about drinking.  I don't like that it makes me stupid.  (This is a pretty common complaint, I suspect.)  I don't like the woozy feeling when I try to walk, if I've really had a lot.  Also, if I drink when I'm tired it keeps me awake longer – and the more I drink, the more of a stimulant it is.  One glass of wine or beer will relax me; two will probably make me sleepy.  But much more than that and it starts working in the opposite direction.  And from time to time – a decade ago, when I drank far more than I do now – I used to have the terrifying experience of going to bed completely snockered and waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe.  Literally.  I'd try to move my lungs and nothing would happen.  I finally learned in those cases to roll over so I was no longer on my back – even to stand up, if I could – and make myself cough.  When I coughed, I would start to breathe again.  And I suppose it probably never lasted more than a few seconds.  (How long can a person go without breathing before brain damage sets in?)  But those few seconds were always very frightening.  That hasn't happened in many years.  The experience (and my figuring out that it was connected to overdoing the alcohol) was, in fact, one of the things that motivated me to cut way back.  Well, ... that and the time eight or ten years ago that Wife asked the boys, in all puzzlement, "Why is the teriyaki sauce in the freezer?" and I suddenly remembered that I had been cleaning up the night before after everyone else had gone to bed and the freezer had seemed like an eminently logical place to put a big jar of teriyaki sauce.  Yeah, actually that too was another sign it was time to cut back.

After hearing stories like these you might logically expect me to have cut out all alcohol permanently; but I haven't.  Why not?  Well, there are things I enjoy about it too.  I enjoy the astringency of alcohol on my tongue and in my mouth.  (I almost never touch mixed drinks or sweet drinks – nothing sweeter than wine or cider or brandy – and these days I generally don't even put ice or water in my spirits. So the astringency of the alcohol is something I can feel clearly.)  I enjoy the warm glow in my throat as it goes down.  And it eases a residual level of anxiety that is otherwise often with me.

I can't tell you what this anxiety is caused by, but I have learned other things about it over the years.  It is not equally strong all the time.  It tends to be stronger at night, when I go back to my apartment alone.  (But sometimes being alone in my apartment is a relief from social anxiety if I've been too much out among people, so it's not just that.)  It tends to be stronger if I have to go to work the next day.  It spikes if I have to spend time around Wife or my father.  Alcohol isn't the only thing that can mask it: so will food (though more fleetingly and not so thoroughly), so will reading (hence my tendency to pull down a book from my shelves and get lost in it ... "farting around" I believe I called it a couple days ago), and so will absorption in a task.  Interestingly, the act of typing one of these blog posts is often absorbing enough to make me forget all about the anxiety while I am doing it (or almost all) ... but the plan or prospect of writing such a post, the very thought of it, makes the anxiety spike briefly and suddenly.

Where does this anxiety manifest?  This is a question that my meditation teachers have said one should ask about any unpleasant emotion: where in the body is it, how large is it, is it warm or cold, and so on.  The idea is to become deeply aware of your feelings, so that in time you can understand where they come from and no longer be mastered by them.  Well, I feel the effects of the anxiety in the normal places you would expect: mostly as a constriction in my throat and another around my heart.  But it radiates originally from an isolated pinpoint inside my skull.  I can even tell you where.  On each side of my head, start at the tops of my ears and move straight up half an inch or an inch.  Draw a line through my skull connecting those two points.  Then halfway across that line is the precise spot that the anxiety emanates from: in the exact middle measuring from left to right, in the back if you measure front to back, and in the upper half as opposed to the lower.  Upper middle back of the skull.  That's the place.  And some time after I start to drink, after the warm glow in my throat begins to dissipate, I feel that spot get warm.  Another drink or two and it feels quite free.  And only then do I realize how much anxiety I have been carrying around and not noticing it, because only then do I set it down.

Probably if I got deeply enough into meditation practice I could figure out what causes this feeling.  Deeper still, and I could probably melt the spot without alcohol or food or distraction.  Thich Nhat Hanh's Fifth Mindfulness Training specifically counsels against losing yourself in consumption – of booze, drugs, or food, but he also includes shopping, entertainment, and the Internet as "drugs" that can be just as addictive as the more strictly pharmaceutical kind.  He counsels doing exactly what I've said here: figure out what it is you are trying to escape from, and then figure out how to escape from it without using any of those things.  I assume it's possible, because I hear people talk that way.

But I'n not that advanced.  So in the meantime, I still drink.  I watch how much I'm having, to make sure I put it down before I start doing stupid things.  I don't drink if I'm anywhere that there might be unpredictable things happening that I'll have to deal with.  I have learned to be scrupulously careful about things like that, so that it doesn't become a problem for me.  Never again do I want to wake up not breathing – never, never, never. 

I read somewhere a few years ago that moderate drinkers live longer than teetotalers, and so do even heavy drinkers – even after you factor in all the health problems that come from heavy drinking.  So if I wanted to be funny I could claim it's all for my health.  But then I remember a scene from the movie "The Big Chill" where one character claims: "Rationalizations are more important than sex. Have you ever tried to go a week without a rationalization?"

There are probably areas in my life where I delude myself by accident.  I don't want to do it on purpose.

Awareness of the body

One of the things I keep hearing about in meditation classes and practice is "awareness of the body".  It goes along with focussing on your breathing – in, out, in, out – and with letting all of the tension in your muscles relax as you ease into a meditative state.  "Awareness of the body" is such a routine phrase that I heard one fellow suggest that the standard Buddhist ideal of mindfulness could just as well be called "body-fulness".

A lot of the time when I hear teachers talk about meditation they seem to be speaking a kind of "Buddhist-ese" ... a jargon that sounds impressive but that I'd probably find I don't understand very well if you asked me to explain any of it in my own words.  So I'm always a little surprised when I find any of it showing up spontaneously in real life.  But tonight, for example, I was planning to go to the movies.  (It's Friday night as I type this, though I don't know what day it will be when it actually posts.)  There's a theater right next door to the big four-year college a half an hour out of town, and they are showing a picture I've never heard of before (but the paper made it sound good): "The Perks of Being a Wallflower."  (If any of you has seen it, let me know what you think.)  The movie starts at 10:00 pm, meaning that it will get out just before "Rocky Horror" starts.  (I said the theater was right next to a college, didn't I?)  So I had a spot of dinner, went to the gym for a desultory swim followed by a soak in the hot tub, and then headed out towards the theater.  I figured I'd stop at a Starbucks for some coffee and an Internet connection, pound out my Friday evening post (I was mulling the topic, "What do I actually want in a romantic partner?"), and then catch the movie.

Most of the way there I realized I didn't have any money with me, so I backtracked a little until I found a bank.  And as I stood at the ATM waiting for it to spit out a couple of twenties, I suddenly realized that I felt exhausted.  Was it the week?  All the bagels I ate at work today?  The hot tub?  I have no idea, but for a moment every muscle in my body felt tired.  Obviously I was going to have to have that coffee to make it through the movie, right?  I collected my cash and my card, got back into my car, put the key in the ignition ... and just stopped.  So many times over the months since I started meditating, I've heard the phrase "awareness of the body", or "mindfulness of the body".  And it was really obvious that my body was telling me it wanted to go home and go to bed.  So was I really going to force myself to stay up for another couple hours or more?  Wouldn't that end up feeling like some kind of violence against myself?  I sat there in the dark, weighing the exhaustion in my flesh against the fun-sounding one-paragraph review I'd read in the paper.  I sat there, remembering all the times I've been told to pay attention to my body.  I sat there, remembering also that it was just yesterday I wrote about what a crock of shit the idea of iron self-discipline is, ... how in my experience (these last two or three decades, at any rate) perpetrating violence against myself by forcing myself to do something I think I want to do invariably means that my body will get its revenge by sabotaging whatever other plans I have, kicking back at the last minute to read the collected Doonesbury cartoons of the last twenty years while blowing off all the great plans I've made for myself ... how I said clearly and somewhat crossly that the only way to control yourself is to submit to yourself, much as the only way we humans have learned to control Nature is by submitting to Natural laws rather than striving somehow quixotically to defy them.

I thought for a minute or two and then I drove back home.  I'm there now, typing this up before I forget it (and so I can say that I posted something on Friday).  But I'll still be in bed by the time the movie was going to start, or at any rate by the time the trailers are done.  Instead of walking back to my car past the line of students in their Frank N. Furter costumes I'll be blissfully snoozing when midnight rolls around.  I'll miss the movie – and it did sound fun – but my body will be happier for it tomorrow.

I don't claim I'm fundamentally any more enlightened than I was yesterday, nor even that I'm going to be consistent about this.  Hell, if I really listened closely to my body I'd probably stop drinking too, and then where would I be?  But it was interesting to watch myself from the outside, and to realize – if only this once and in a small way – that maybe I'd learned something good to know.

Reply to Debbie's farewell, last part

And finally, in conclusion, ....
__________

I suggest that you tell your therapist the whole story of your relationship with Wife.  Tell her about how you met, what the early years were like, how Wife’s behavior changed over the years.  Tell her about the incident with the kitchen knife when Son1 and Son2 were little.  Tell about the many affairs and about Boyfriend4.  Tell about Wife’s many episodes of taking her medications and drinking and passing out.  Tell about Son2 coping for and “parenting” Wife.  Tell about the many threats and accusations and about the dramatic suicide attempts.  Tell her about how you behaved in reaction to all this and about measures you took to protect yourself and the boys and to get free.  Tell your therapist everything from beginning to end.  This will be difficult and you won’t want to do it, so start with what you are able to tell her and go from there.

I may have told her some of this already … I forget what I have, and what I haven’t.  But I sent her this letter unedited.  Her reaction was not “Oh my God, she did what???”  Her reaction was, rather, “So how did all these things affect Debbie? Why did they matter to her? It seems like that one piece of the puzzle is missing.”  I described your story of going through four years of therapy and twelve-step work after separating from your husband, and only then coming to see things in a clearer perspective.  And I told her that you have suggested the same may be true for me.

Of course it might be.  We’ll have to see.  Her general comment, though, is that she tends to think there’s not only one way up the mountain.  Maybe my path is a different one, and will go by way of different steps than yours.  Not that she said she doesn’t want to hear any of this stuff … she’s willing to listen to anything I want to talk about.  But she did suggest that I should have an idea why a story matters before I start telling it, to make sure we are using the time productively.  And other than letting her know that these things happened – which I did in any event by sending her your letter – I’m not sure I can tell right now why it matters that she know all the details of how they happened.  Maybe I’m overlooking something, though.

I’m not sure where this leaves us.  Of course I’m never going to send this letter, so I could just stop here.  Maybe I will be able to think of a clever summary tomorrow morning.  I don’t have one right now.

I will always love you,

Hosea

Discipline? What's that?

Lately it seems like my self-discipline has gone to hell, although to be fair I'm not sure it was that much better even a few years ago.

A couple days ago I mentioned -- obliquely, so that none of you could really hold me to it [see how clever I am?] -- that I intended to write something in this blog every day.  Then I posted the multi-part reply to Debbie's letter, and said that even though it was spread across several days that didn't count.  So then I didn't post anything Wednesday ... or, if you count on Wednesday the post that I started Tuesday night, I didn't post Tuesday.  Maybe that one post counts for both, I don't know.  (It looks like I posted on Tuesday, but those were both written Monday night and queued up till I connected to the Internet Tuesday morning.)

Of course the question whether I post this day or that is pretty trivial.  It just nags at me because it was so recently that I decided I wanted to be better about this.  And it seem of a piece with other things I see myself doing.  I was going to get up at 5:00 this morning to get some stuff done.  Alarm went off at 5:00, I got up to take a leak, then re-set the alarm for 6:00.  Or last weekend, I had a shitload of things I was planning to do Sunday; so of course Sunday morning I lay around reading a book I've read a couple of times already, in years past.  I mean ... it's an interesting book and all, Sebastian Haffner's The Meaning of Hitler.  But why bother?  Why now?  I'm not in the middle of any kind of historical research.  The only reason I can think of is that it was a way to kill the morning in a relaxed and easy manner, thus forcing me to cancel about half the things on my to-do list (including my laundry).

And so on.

Why am I telling you this?  Shit, I don't know.  Confession, I suppose.  It's safe telling you all my faults because I don't have to look you in the eyes afterwards and you don't have to live with me.  Maybe if I can expatiate on these faults over here then it keeps me from having to recognize those faults over there, and all the while I can give myself credit for being open about my faults ... in a totally safe and risk-free way.  See, I'm courageous too, as well as honest and forthright.  Боже мой!  

Maybe a better question is, why can't I get my ass in gear to get done the things that I want to get done.  I do want to, right?  It's not like somebody else is making me do these things.  Wife's not handing me to-do lists.  I really did want to have clean clothes for the week, just as an example.  And while I don't remember what else I had planned for last Sunday, I'm sure that whatever it was I must really have wanted to do it.  

So why don't I?

I suppose the answer has to be that while I want to do this and that, I also want to spend a certain amount of leisure time farting around.  My enthusiastic plans don't take that into account, so when the time comes to execute them I say, "Aaah, the hell with it" and do something else instead.  Once upon a time I think I used to be better at forcing my nose to the grindstone.  Now, consciously or not, I seem to shrug and say, "Look, I'm over fifty. Whaddya gonna do about it?"

In some cases, the answer could be bad.  Right now at work I have a whole lot of stuff to get lined up looking pretty before the company faces a big audit next month.  I've started work on it all, but probably I should have started months ago.  Probably I need to figure out some good story to tell our auditor about why we're only halfway through all this crap when he gets here.  In some ways I think I've been spoiled by the fact that I can usually get away with spouting a line of very well-informed and highly intelligent bullshit: people figure I must know what I'm talking about, and so there must be good reasons why I haven't done whatever it is that I haven't done.  It's useful and all, because it keeps me employed and somebody's got to pay for all that expensive education the boys are getting.  But every time I get away with something like that it makes me more likely to figure I can get away with it again.  That's probably not a good cycle to encourage.

Now that I think about it, though, ....  If I can realize that part of what I really want is leisure time, and if I can understand that I want it badly enough I'm willing to disrupt any other plans I've made in order to grab it, then maybe I can actually make a point of planning it into my day, or my week.  I wonder if that would help?  I wonder if I could talk myself into buckling down and getting this done now, on the grounds that I know for a fact I'll let myself goof off at this time later?  Since all self-discipline really involves various levels of self-manipulation*, maybe I can get myself to fall for this.  Or at least it's worth a try.

I remember years and years ago, reading a book by Jon Elster about imperfect rationality, where he specifically considered the case where I want X now, but I know that later on I will want Y instead.  So if I can't have both and I really want X now, is there some way to constrain myself so I can't go after Y later, even though by then I will have changed my mind about what I want?  The whole thing came back to me as I was thinking about my alarm clock this morning: last night I wanted to get stuff done this morning, but by morning what I really wanted was more sleep.  (When I say "the whole thing" I don't mean any of his technical analysis, none of which I really understood all that well even thirty years ago when I read it. But I remembered the examples he used, and took time away from finishing this blog post to go browse the Internet until I could find the man's name again and a reference to the book. See how this works? It's insidious ....)

I've probably figured out as much as I need to figure out with this post.  Maybe I should shut up now.  See ya ....
__________

* I'm quite serious about identifying self-discipline with informed, intelligent self-manipulation.  I remember a story my father once told me that just disgusted me with his lack of self-control (I assume he was trying for a different kind of effect), but I realized even at the time that what I mean by "self-control" was really "self-understanding".  The story was all about one time when he and my Mom were young marrieds and I was just a baby.  He had had to be out of town for a couple of weeks, and so when he came back and my Mom was trying to get his help with this and that (things he hadn't been there to do) he was totally incapable of paying attention or helping her because, as he put it, "I was so horny I honked."  They ended up fighting because of course she had been on her own for two weeks with a new baby, her nerves were frazzled, and at that precise instant she really wanted help more than she wanted sex, thank you very much.  Anyway, I didn't say anything to my Dad but what I was thinking was, "Dude, how could you be so inconsiderate? Jesus, don't you know that's what masturbation is for? So that you don't go crazy and can still function? Why the hell weren't you whacking off every night while you were gone, so that when you got back you could be sweet and helpful ... and then be ready for sex when she was finally ready instead of rushing things?"  I didn't say it, but I thought it.  And the key, from my point of view, is that "self-control" in this context did not mean for me some kind of violent self-mastery through an iron will.  No, it meant understanding yourself well enough to know what you have to do to set up conditions so that you will naturally act in the way you need to act.  If you are at risk of being too sexually demanding, it means whacking off enough that you can relax.  It categorically does not mean forcing yourself to be continent when every cell of your body is crying for release ... just for example ....


  

Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 3

Continuing some more ....
__________

3. This is something we have not talked about.  I see a pattern in your Mom’s relationship with your Dad and Wife’s relationship with you that worries me.  Your mother is very, very passive in her relationship with your Dad, and remains super-calm and non-reactive in response to him.  While Wife is not passive – she acts out- over the years she became helpless.  I really don’t want to step into this pattern of women who do not function to their full capacity. 

This is the easiest one of all to deal with, because your interpretation is simply wrong.  Yes, my mother is very passive around my father, super-calm and non-reactive.  What you fail to see is that she is the active and competent one.  My father is the helpless one.  So if you want to compare my parents’ relationship with mine-and-Wife’s, it is wrong to see them both as cases of helpless women and active men.  The real parallel is that Wife is like my father and I’m like my mother.  It’s the same pattern, all right, but with the sex roles reversed.  The pattern is that one partner is loud, self-centered, belligerent, and helpless; while the other is quiet, passive, self-effacing, and gets things done.  What interested me so much about our relationship (yours and mine) is that you are like my mother.  You even look like her, a little bit.  So I did kind of wonder what it would be like in the long term, for the two of us to be together with each other … since we both fall on the same side of that equation.