Blast from the past: Trying to cut a deal with Wife

[Here is something else I found in the old files on my computer. The document that I reprint here is dated September 23, 2003.]

Back in 2003 and 2004 I was out of work for a year and a half. Oh, I spent plenty of time every day looking for work. I must have clicked "send" on 800 applications, and I had lots of interviews. But one way or another it just took a really long time for the penny to drop. (Wife had stopped working and gone out on permanent disability because of her lupus just a few years before.)

During that same time, Wife had been church-shopping, and she had found a Baptist church that appealed to her. So she started attending it regularly, and kept asking me and the boys to come along ... not for the sake of our souls, but because she felt that it reflected badly on her to attend a church but not have her family with her. (This reason sounded crazy to me at the time, but I did not yet know the word narcissism.)

Somewhere along the line she told somebody in her small group about the trouble I was having finding a job, and also about how she couldn't persuade me to join her. They told her, Ask him what he needs from you. It's your job as his wife to support him through this trial, so get him to write out a list of what he needs from you: retyping his resume, making dinner, doing the laundry ... whatever it is. Then make sure you do everything on the list as well as you possibly can. And then you can ask him to join you at church in return.

So she asked. I thought about it for a while, and this is what I came back with. You can see from this that getting my resume retyped or dinner made was not exactly where I thought the problem was. 
____________________

What I want from you

High priority

Right now, I am told by everyone that my highest priority needs to be finding a new job. (Everyone except M---, who says I should also spend 2 hours a day writing; and somewhere in there I should also exercise.) But I often feel like my real job is negotiating major emotional upheavals between us. This can take hours a day, and it leaves me in no frame of mind to hunt for work. The best way to support my job hunt is therefore not to make my PowerPoint slides for me, but to lift this particular burden from my shoulders.

1. Be a walking example of a Christian:

• Let the love of Christ keep you happy, even – no, especially – when you don’t get what you want.
• Let God handle vengeance in his own time and his own way – therefore do not harbor grudges.
• When life dumps mountains on you – and it’ll happen! – rely on God’s infinite power and love to turn them into molehills.
• Trust in God, even when what he is doing is very bizarre.
• If Christ is with you, then the bastards can’t grind you down – so be not afraid that they might.
• Whatever happens to you – and sometimes it is pretty bad and horribly unfair – remember that Christ knows exactly how you feel and is suffering there with you. He too suffered from injustice, and his divine power could have left Golgotha a crater like Sodom and Gomorrah. But he didn’t. Let his friendship and en­courage­ment help you bear the troubles with a good heart.

2. Hold to the Truth as to life itself.

• When we get into big arguments (which I hope will be a lot rarer), you tell me about things I allegedly said and did that bear little or no relationship to anything I remember.
• Sometimes you can even quote whole conversations back to me that never happened, and I will be able to tell that the conversation grew out of one or two words that I did utter but that meant something totally different in context.
• When this happens I become truly frightened.
• I don’t know if this ever happens when you talk to others about things, and it may be out of your power to do anything about this; but so far as you can please try to hold fast to what really happened instead of allowing your memory to embellish it to what “should have happened”.

Low priority

(There are probably a bunch of these and – like any husband –I could probably keep adding to them if I took the time. But they are not central. If you can tackle them, great. If not, OK fine. I have not bothered trying to choose only the important ones because these are all lower priority.)

1. Remember that just because I yell about something doesn’t make it important. 

2. Eat foods that are good for you, at times that are good for you.

3. Don’t let yourself be helpless unless through illness you really can’t avoid it. (This means don’t let yourself be a victim of other people’s thought­less­ness, even if it is mine. For example, buy fruit if you need fruit and I haven’t gotten around to it. It doesn’t mean “Don’t rage against victimization,” because that is already covered under high-priority item #1 above.)

4. Do what you can to keep the kids occupied while I am job hunting. (You really already do this to a very large extent, so I’m not asking for any change here; I just need to mention it for the sake of completeness.)

5. More sex would be nice. (smile)

6. Let’s make dates to go to the gym a couple of times a week, regularly.

  

There will doubtless be other things I might want to ask until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

What I will offer in exchange

1. I will go to church with you every Sunday. Not till Christmas. Not till Easter. I will go to church with you every Sunday as long as you carry out item #1 on the “high priority” list in the other column – because as long as you can carry that out successfully, it proves to me that Christianity is not a fraud. If God’s infinite power can’t help you to accomplish item #1, then Christianity is a fraud and it’s not worth my time to play along. [I'm not sure this actually follows, but it is the reason I gave her at the time.] If you do your best but stumble because we are all fallible … let’s discuss it on a case-by-case basis.

2. Ditto with sending the children to Sunday School, for exactly the same reasons. Same caveat.

3. When I yell, I will commit to getting over it right away, and to apologizing to the person I yelled to.

4. If you need to eat while I’m fixing another meal, I will not complain providing you eat foods that are good for you.

5. I will commit to exercising a minimum of twice a week, and try for a third time, whether or not you choose to join me.

6. I will drop the issue of Boyfriend 2 once and for all, permanently. (Notwithstanding this, I’d like to know who we get to do the repairs around our house or hear the kind of gossip I might hear about our other friends … if you feel inclined to share such gossip and not otherwise.)

There will doubtless be other things you would like to ask of me until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

____________________

Her friends at church thought this was a wonderful offer on my part, and a great opportunity to rope me in. In the end she wasn't all that successful at being Christlike, but I guess it was worth a try ....
   

Did I have green teeth? ... or did she?

The title comes from this post twelve years ago. It was one of several (including this one and this one) where I tried to understand why Wife was so absolutely not sexually attracted to me, why she appeared to find me sexually loathsome.

Well yesterday I was rummaging through some old files on my home computer -- looking for the notes that I published as this article on the Patio -- and I found where I had saved so many of Wife's IMs with Boyfriend 5, back when she spent all day texting him and then I'd stay up at night and copy them into hidden files for later reference. I paged through a few of them, just for the sheer self-flagellating discomfort of it all, I suppose. I even found one where she tells what appears to be the exact same story I told in this post, only from her point of view:

Hosea's version: The other morning she was sitting on our bed wearing nothing but a skimpy nightie, and I told her how genuinely attractive I find her ... still, after all the years we have been married. Her response was to curl up in a ball in fetal position and beg me to stop saying it. 

Wife's version: [addressing Boyfriend 5, about me] Yes, I admitted that he's closer to me than anyone. He said "If only you could see how sexy you are" and I lost it. I just grabbed my nightgown strap out of his hand, wrapped my arms around my knees and put my head down on my knees and cried.

And as I browsed the texts just before and after this, I think I saw something of an explanation. It doesn't contradict any of the hypotheses that I spun in the posts I reference up top, but it adds some detail.

In the first place, Wife hated her own looks. Just a few lines farther down in the text message above, she told Boyfriend 5, "I look at my own body and find myself hideous." And I think the next step was that, if she was hideous and I still desired her anyway, I must be a pathetic loser. When I tried to act in ways that (so I hoped) would reassure her and make her feel loved, she read it as neediness, pawing at her, clinging to her. And I suppose that if you start from her premises, that's logical; anybody who would treat a hideous gorgon as if she were desirable must be doing it out of desperation, ... right? But we all know that desperation is a turn off. Desperate, needy, clinging people are never sexy.

In short, I think that by telling her she was sexy, I guaranteed that she would think I wasn't.

This is consistent, too, with her hating to let me see her orgasm. On the one hand, like any of us, she had to get the release any way she could. If she could close her eyes and shut out the world, if she could pretend she was totally alone, then she could concentrate on feeling the squishy arousing wetness and the explosive ecstasy in her loins. On the other hand if anybody could see her, then all she could think of would be her own (presumed) ugliness reflected back in their eyes -- an image, I have to guess, of some grotesque, chancred hag wandering alone in a blasted wasteland and dementedly strumming herself. Uncouth. Brazen. Revolting.

I hope I'm wrong, but that seems too consistent with the data to be all the way off base.

What a terrible way to live.
        

Narcissistic Personality Quiz, take 2

I was scrolling through some old posts this afternoon (sheesh, don't I have anything better to do with my time?) and I came across this one from five and a half years ago. Unlike the 7-deadly-sins quiz, where I think I am settling into a routine (my most recent instance is here), I hadn't taken this one again in the intervening time. So sure, what the hell? I tried it again.

You can find it here: http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm. 

Remember the scoring criteria:

Between 12 and 15 is average.
Celebrities often score closer to 18.
Narcissists score over 20.

This time I scored a 12, so it's nice to know I have worked my way up to normal. I wish I could remember what my answers were last time, so I would know what I had changed.

Something I didn't make a note of last time -- and maybe this is an enhancement to the quiz -- is that the scoring page also gives a breakdown of how I rate on several different components of narcissism.

Quoting from the website, those components are:

Authority

Authority refers to a person's leadership skills and power. People who score higher on authority like to be in charge and gain power, often for power's sake alone.

Self-Sufficiency

This trait refers to how self-sufficient a person is, that is, how much you rely on others versus your own abilities to meet your needs in life.

Superiority

This trait refers to whether a person feels they are more superior than those around them. You scored particularly high in superiority, suggesting you feel you are superior to most others.

Exhibitionism

This trait refers to a person's need to be the center of attention, and willingness to ensure they are the center of attention (even at the expense of others' needs).

Exploitativeness

This trait refers to how willing you are to exploit others in order to meet your own needs or goals.

Vanity

This trait refers to a person's vanity, or their belief in one's own superior abilities and attractiveness compared to others.

Entitlement

This trait refers to the expectation and amount of entitlement a person has in their lives, that is, unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with one's expectations. People who score higher on this trait generally have a greater expectation of entitlement, while those who score lower expect little from others or life.

And here, I think, is the explanation for the paradox that I noted last time I took the quiz, when I had so much trouble reconciling what feels to me like extravagant conceit with my (even now, comparatively) low score on this quiz. Because I scored particularly high on my sense of superiority, pretty high on authority, but low on exhibitionism, vanity, and entitlement. And I scored a flat zero on self-sufficiency.

This is pretty much what I said before ... conceit tempered with timidity. I think one of the differences compared with last time is that I gave myself a few more points for authority, based partly on Marie's observations to me about "the Tanatu charisma." (She came up with the phrase after meeting both my sons and learning that none of the three of us has ever been able to disappear into the wallpaper.)

I suppose it is nice to know I'm still not at pathological levels ....
      

In case I die ....

Some day I should get around to writing a will. [Whenever anyone tells you "Some day I should" that is an exact synonym for "I will never in my life...."] But in the meantime at least I have written a letter to my boys that sits in the front of my filing cabinet that tells them things like where to find information about my insurance, etc., and how to get into my computer.

But I am torn when it comes to my two blogs (this one and the Patio). I already discussed this topic once here. But what do I do? I can tell them that the blogs exist, so at least they can read them. I don't know if there is a risk that BlogSpot might take them down if I go too long with no activity. But I don't want to give them the ability to delete it all while I'm alive. Hell, I'd just as soon they not be able to delete it after I die. Export, sure; delete, not so much.

Anyway, I was thinking about it today while updating that letter I mentioned. I try to update it once a year, just after Christmas, so you see I'm only half a year late. (sigh) What I settled for doing this time was just to list the two URLs down at the bottom of a page of people to notify in case I'm gone ... list them totally without comment. So maybe they are blogs I read? Or whatever. But then if the boys have any curiosity at all, it's easy enough to plug them into a browser to see what pops up. And I assume it will be pretty easy for them to figure out that it's me, once they start reading. The diary entries (especially the early ones) are often about events that included them. And then there's this. On the other hand I won't have made an overt statement, so if there's anything where plausible deniability is needed, maybe it's available in a stretch.

Or maybe I shouldn't be so damned subtle. Maybe I should spend less time communicating like Leo Strauss, for heaven's sake. It's not like anybody could ever tell what Strauss meant, either ....
        

Home ownership

Back in February, Marie and I had a conversation (over text) about home ownership. It started when she was talking about some routine natural disaster in her area -- I don't remember if it was heavy rain or sudden snow or quite what it was. And she talked about a coworker who had been delayed getting to work by having to mop up after the crisis. Anyway, from there the discussion went on like this: .... 

 
The poem she is referencing is this one here.

I'm not sure whether I have more to say about the subject besides this. But yes, sometimes I do miss owning a house....
   

The absolutism of youth

I debated calling this post "But you have so much to live for!" It is still possible that would have been a better title, but "the absolutism of youth" picks up a phrase I used in a post a couple days ago. Mostly I just want to capture an idea I have had for some years, so it is recorded somewhere.

Why do the young commit suicide? From the perspective of those of us who are no longer young, it looks foolish: they are throwing away decades of future opportunity, and there is every likelihood that somewhere in those decades the thing that is upsetting them so badly will resolve itself in some other way. So it just looks inexplicable.

The thing is, that's not what it looks like from the inside. When you are young, the choices that you can see look very stark. And frequently all the available options look pretty bad. When you try to take an inventory of what you have inside yourself, what tools you have to confront a threatening and terrible world, it's a pretty bleak and empty picture. The tool chest doesn't have a lot in it. The room you live in, when you retreat deep inside yourself, is shabby and spare. There's not much furniture, and the carpet shows wear and holes.

And as a result, suicide doesn't look nearly as irrational as it does to those of us who are older. We are accustomed to think of the opportunities lost as worth something, and so we look at the suicide of the young as an incredible waste. But the young themselves have no way to assess what these hypothetical -- or perhaps imaginary, fictitious, fantastical -- opportunities are worth, so they tally them up as worth nothing. Zero. When they try to evaluate the worth of what really is there, that they might be throwing away, it's easy for them to overlook assets (I mean spiritual or psychological or emotional assets) that they have never had to imagine life without; it is easy to treat those as just part of the wallpaper. And so again, it is easy to come out with a much smaller, paltrier inventory than an older person would sum up. And if are in great pain, and all you have to give up to get out of that great pain is a handful of pocket change, ... what the hell? Why not throw it away and be done?

Of course, the old kill themselves too. Minutes before I started typing this, I googled the question how suicide statistics vary across age groups, and found (for example) this article which states that, "In general, the suicide rate increases with age," although it then goes on to concede that there is "a major spike in adolescents and young adults." But my own recollection from my days as a teenager or an undergraduate or a graduate student is that life felt like it had less ballast than it does today (in my late fifties). Maybe it is just that back then my own depression was undiagnosed and I wasn't taking antidepressants. Maybe the whole experience is chemical. But it feels like ballast. And back then my life did feel much lighter and flimsier, much sparer and emptier, much cheaper and easier to imagine throwing away without losing much. I never did it -- I'm afraid of pain, and I often drag my feet before taking any big steps; so then I'd go to bed and wake up feeling less dismal the next day.

In other words, the very thing that makes the old so alarmed when they see they young kill themselves -- that they have their whole future in front of them -- is exactly what makes it (comparatively) easier. Nobody can feel the future. It is purely abstract. And so if all the value that gives substance and meaning to your life is in the future, that's the same as saying that you have none of it in your hands to draw on right now. It's like when you say, "This stock has tremendous growth potential," and what you mean is "It's selling for a penny a share so there's nowhere to go but up." Having so much (in the future) to live for is all very well, but it is only after you have done some of that living, after you have converted some of that potential into actuality (for better or worse), that you can really feel like you have something to lose.
           

A new post from 2017

Yesterday I posted something that I wrote to Marie back in 2017 ... and I set the date to the day I actually wrote it. Not that anyone is tracking this blog any more, but if you were you'd miss it. So here's a pointer.

https://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/2017/02/as-if-summons.html

Sometimes I think it's kind of entertaining how I can make one post count multiple times in my overall stats just by doing what I'm doing here: post it in one place and then point to it from another. If I were, you know, paid by the post or something that might almost be cheating. I'm not, so I suppose it doesn't matter much.