I finally heard back ....

Late this evening, I got an e-mail from D. It seems all my worrying was for nothing; she had just been really slammed all day at work, and hadn't had a chance even to sit down at a keyboard long enough to drop me a quick note. No, I hadn't crossed any invisible lines; yes, everything was fine. All the passion and exuberance that I have been hearing in her e-mails for the past couple weeks was there in spades.

I had been pondering whether I should post some or all of this last exchange, but I don't think there's any special need. I've pretty much summed it up in the preceding paragraph. I just thought I should say something, since in my post earlier today I had expressed a measure of worry. There was one interesting point, however. In my e-mail to D last night, I had mentioned incidentally that I have a business trip coming up in a couple of weeks. It will be taking me for three days to a city that is a long ways away from where D lives, but that is at any rate in the same time zone (which my home city is not). It was a throw-away remark, in amongst a lot of other stuff, but D obviously spotted it.

And it appears that I have a date ....

Wish me well.

.

Counseling 13

My e-mails with D have continued as intense as they were before, and then today I have heard nothing from her at all. So I have been watching my Inbox fairly closely, worried that something I wrote last night may have crossed a line I didn't know existed. All of which is only to say that today's session with Counselor didn't have my full attention.

But maybe it should have. Wife announced that Boyfriend 5 (and his father) want to visit us some time in the next couple of months. Say what? Yes, she went on. They don't think it is fair to ask her to fly all the way to the Old Country to visit them if she hasn't ever met them in person. And Wife even agreed that she would feel more comfortable making an international trip to far away if she had earlier met the people she would be visiting.

Counselor asked me how I felt about this, and my first question was, "Are you asking me or telling me?" (She wasn't asking.) So how do I feel about it? Hell, I don't know. What difference does it make how I feel about it? It's a free country and it's not exactly like I can stop them.

But Counselor pushed a little more and I had to say something. I started by saying that -- as Wife knows all too well -- I'm not terribly good about sharing my living space with people I don't know. No problem, they'd come in an RV, so they wouldn't have to sleep on the sofa. (Why don't they just teleport? Surely it would be cheaper. Besides, then they could sleep in the comfort of their own beds at night and still come back the next morning.) Does that address my concerns?

No, of course it doesn't. Since I believe these people are continuing to lie to Wife about basic things, and since I can't figure out their motivations, I have to assume the worst. That includes assuming that they plan to case the house, or at least help themselves to anything small and moveable on the way out. Maybe not, of course, but I don't have enough data to take any possibilities off the table. So I suggested maybe they -- we -- could meet at a restaurant instead of our house.

Wife isn't too thrilled about that. I mean, she doesn't mind meeting at a restaurant first, but she sees their visit as lasting a couple of days and obviously wants to be able to bring them back to the house in the meantime. She also accused me of resisting this idea because I don't like them.

Well no, I don't. But there are people I dislike whom I would nonetheless trust not to steal from me. I didn't emphasize my fear of theft, but I did tell Wife that I thought the basic question of trust had to be settled before we could even talk about liking / disliking; and I pointed out that I don't know them well enough to have reached even that first level yet. (I remained silent about the things I do know which make me actively distrust them. I figured it was not the right time.)

However, Counselor had a good idea here. (Or somebody did ... I don't quite remember who.) I agreed, in a theoretical kind of way, that it would be a good thing if I could get to the point of trusting these people more ... sort of the way it could be useful for Hell to freeze over. Wife also wants me to trust them. So how about we take this goal -- my becoming able to trust these varmints -- as a common goal and brainstorm ways to achieve it? That way we can at least talk about these things without the conversation having to degenerate into Hosea vs. Wife. And who knows? We might come up with something.

I don't hold out a lot of hope for that, but at least we got through the session without any major tantrums or other trouble. And if we can get to a point where Wife is more willing to talk to me about Boyfriend 5 and his family, that might be progress too. I guess that's enough for one session.

Meanwhile I still haven't heard back from D since last night -- this is the longest she has gone without e-mailing me in two weeks -- so I am really beginning to wonder if I put my foot in it badly. I'll let you know once I find out.

.

Eight things I love about Wife

Back at the end of September, I promised I would write this post; so it is about time I did. After all the griping that I do in this forum, it is only fair if I give some of the other side. And really, I would never have married Wife in the first place if she hadn't had a lot more going for her than I have given you any reason to expect. So let me try to summarize a few of those things.

Grammatical note: For simplicity, I am going to write this all in the present tense. Some of these things have become less true over time, or fluctuate with the ups and downs of her health. But they are all part of the overall picture.

Wife is smart.

We met just out of college. She was Phi Beta Kappa and on her way to graduate school: literature major, classics minor ... the only person I know who can sight-read Latin. Back when Umberto Eco published The Name of the Rose, I read it to Wife because I thought she would enjoy it. She laughed heartily at all the little medievalist in-jokes Eco buried in the book, and translated the long passages of Latin for me by reading it straight off the page (as I would do with English.)

Wife is funny.

I tried to remember some of her better one-liners to exhibit here, but mostly they are context-dependent and wouldn't sound funny on the page. But in the flow of conversation they sparkle: her timing is perfect, her comments acerbic. Like other people I know who suffer a lot of pain over a long time, Wife learned that wisecracks helped her cope, ... just a bit. And she's good at them.

Wife is ambitious, sometimes even cocky.

OK, not so much these days, and the change has been a big blow to her. But part of the reason the blow was so severe is that, whatever she has done, her goal was always the top. At one point, when we were discussing a graduate program and were unsure if it was really the right move, Wife proposed law school as a back-up alternative on the grounds that there is always a demand for lawyers. “Besides,” she added, “How hard can it be?” [Memo: It didn’t actually work out anything like that. But at the time her sheer audacity was bracingly refreshing.]

Wife is demanding, of herself as well as others.

Again, she was never as successful as she wanted to be. But there was a track-record of real achievement to back up the ambition. And after all, sometimes "high maintenance" also means high performance".

• I already mentioned Phi Beta Kappa.


• Years later, when she was teaching high school English, students would come into her classroom the first day and say, "No! Don't tell me I got assigned to Mrs. Hosea's class. I'll have to work twice as hard as any of my friends!" One of these students came back the year after he graduated, though, to tell her, "Mrs. Hosea, do you realize I am teaching all the guys in my frat how to write an essay? There are Juniors at my college who don't even know what a topic sentence is! I hated your class when I was taking it, but now I am so glad you pounded all that stuff into my head ...."


• That was about the same time she wrote an editorial essay for the big metropolitan newspaper near where we lived at the time. (Think on the scale of the Times, the Post, the Tribune ....) She submitted it after working through about 27 drafts, and some junior assistant editor called her to say they'd like to run it if only they could cut it down by a third. Wife said she would rather do the cutting herself. Junior Assistant Editor -- having worked with authors before, obviously -- demurred. So Wife pulled out a copy of what she had sent in, and started going through it on the phone, sentence by sentence, trimming every bit of remaining fat. At the end, she had it the right length, and Junior Assistant Editor just said, in a hushed voice, "That's the best author cut I have ever seen." Oh, ... and the piece was funny, too.


• Years after that she was working in, ... well, let’s call it small-scale custom manufacturing. Supposedly she was the Shop Manager (i.e., operations and not sales), but there were certain clients who wouldn’t talk to anybody else. She always said at that job that her employees hated her but her customers loved her: she could get them exactly the product they wanted, at a price where the store still made money. The jobs she brought in were difficult, and she asked a lot of her staff ... but none of her competitors could turn out the same product in the same time for the same price.


• Fast forward again, to a time when the boys are in school and Wife has had to leave work because of illness. Time and again she would butt heads with their teachers. I would hear about it over dinner, “Hosea, I can’t stand it! I am so much better a teacher than that woman in their classroom.” “Yes, dear, but you are too sick to hold down a job with a regular schedule, so let her do her best.” Now, the boys were both in a special program in the school district, one that the district took a dim view of. And from time to time, some issue affecting the program would come before the school board. When this happened, the teachers in the program let us parents know about it, and they’d ask us to attend the school board meeting to support the program. Usually this job fell to the mothers, and usually there would be several of them there, plugging the program as best they could. But they all looked and sounded like Somebody’s Mom: sweatshirt, blue jeans, tennis shoes. The rest of the day that would be fine, but sometimes during school board meetings it seemed to undercut the delivery of the message. In any event, Wife took the assignment a bit differently. Even if she had just spent the afternoon shouting at one of the teachers – heck, even if she was not currently on speaking terms with the teachers – she knew better than to let the program be ploughed under. And so, before the board meeting, she would go back home to get dressed: suit, hose, pumps, pearls, tasteful earrings, hair in a professional bun, makeup. Then, when the board opened the floor to allow comments from the public, she was clear, organized, articulate; she knew all the educational jargon; and she could speak the languages of both management and the classroom. And she knocked them dead.

Wife is a good teacher.

This may sound obvious after the foregoing stories, but I mean more than that she is demanding. It continues to amaze me, but for all her impatience with other aspects of life, Wife is infinitely patient in the classroom. The turmoil and confusion of her outside life fall away; she is clear and organized and always unruffled. And she is consistent, whether teaching one student or thirty.

Wife is a good mother.

This point strikes, if you will, closer to home. I have alluded to the few times that Wife has really bombed in the area of motherhood (see here for only one example), but what is remarkable is that there are so few. It’s not just that every parent has bad days – heaven knows I’ve had more than my share. It’s that Wife’s own parents were such a catastrophe, in so many ways. Knowing about them, it is easy to see why Wife is as neurotic as she is, why her emotional life is so screwed up. And yet, ... “everybody knows” that abused children become abusing parents. “Everybody knows” that children raised in dysfunctional ways end up learning that the dysfunctional behavior is “normal” and passing it on to the next generation. “Everybody knows” these things, and for the most part they might even be true ... but not for Wife. Wife has worked very hard to see through the crazy things her parents did, so that she won’t repeat the patterns herself. And for the most part, she has succeeded admirably. The boys are absolutely secure in knowing that they have her unconditional love. She has a few bad days, I guess, but no more than any other parent.

Wife is idealistic.

Oh my word. I could talk for days. Let me give only two examples.

Early in our marriage, Wife came home to our apartment in the mid-afternoon to interrupt a burglar, who was carrying off our neighbor’s television set. She later identified him and filed a report with the police. For various reasons this became a big, divisive issue in the little community where we lived (never mind the details right now) and it caused Wife a lot of grief. Most everybody we knew congratulated her on her courage, but soon added, “Don’t you know better than to confront a burglar?” But Wife stuck to her guns. At one point I was talking with Wife’s mother, who was still alive back then, about how very difficult the whole situation had been for Wife, and how she refused to make things easier by just backing away from it. Her mother sighed ruefully, but with obvious pride in her voice, and said, “You know, Hosea, it’s that righteous indignation. The whole family suffers from it sumthin’ terrible.”

In every school where Wife has ever taught, she has been an instantly polarizing figure. She accepted no standard but the best. And whenever a school accepted less than that – cutting class time to make room for extracurricular activities, or nudging up the star quarterback’s grades so he didn’t lose his eligibility – Wife was incapable of keeping her mouth shut. As a result, she could bring out in the open – as a newcomer – tensions that had been submerged among the faculty for years. During her first year at every new school she ever joined, she became a fault line. Invariably the faculty would polarize into those who supported Wife and those who opposed her. The irony is that her idealism sounded arrogant to those who didn’t want to be held accountable to it, but she never meant it arrogantly. When an opponent would derisively challenge her that she wanted everyone else to be just like her, she would reply in all innocence, “Oh no, not at all.” She was all too aware of where she fell short of the ideals she supported, and she wanted the school to aspire to far better than that!

Wife is – or can be – astonishingly empathetic.

I have often said, with only slight overstatement, that Wife can find something to discuss with anybody. It’s true that I’ve also said sometimes she can be tone deaf about what is the right thing to say; but that she can get a conversation going with anybody at all – that she can, in fact, find something that she and the other person have in common, as a point of personal connection, regardless of who it is – this is by itself remarkable.

She is even better when it comes to understanding pain. Maybe – probably – it is because she has been in so much pain herself, over the course of her life; but whatever the reason, she has a profound intuitive understanding of suffering, even in perfect strangers. Wife can talk to anyone about their problems.

One ironic consequence of this talent is that back when she was a teacher, for all her idealism about standards, her A students were rarely her favorites. Her A students, after all, came at her from a position of strength; as a result, all they ever encountered were her strengths in turn, and they all tended to think of her as a demanding, aggressive bitch. But the students who came to her (initially) asking for mercy on an assignment, because of problems external to the school that blocked their ability to focus on schoolwork – the students who lived in gang territory, and stayed up every night fearing that their older brothers could be killed; the students who had to fend for themselves when they got home, because the parents were separated or bankrupt or alcoholic or dead – these students found in Wife (sometimes to their great surprise) an ocean of boundless compassion. She would talk with them for hours after school to give whatever advice she could, and to lend a soft shoulder when advice was no longer possible. And she would ignore the persistent reprimands from her Principals that “Once 3:00 pm rolls around, these kids are no longer our problem until tomorrow morning. Send them away!”

Even now, sick as she is, Wife volunteers on a “prayer line”. Twice a week, she logs into a system that routes phone calls to her (along with other volunteers), a system kind of like the old Dial-a-Prayer except that the caller can explain his problems and ask for a particular kind of prayer. Wife is forbidden (for legal and policy reasons) to give concrete advice; but she listens to the callers pour out their hearts, and then she tries to shape the prayer in a way that she thinks will help them in the right direction. After her shift is done, she can be cynical (even bitchy) about the theology of the organization which sponsors this service; she can get tired of the fellow who calls every single week to ask for a prayer that he win the lottery. But every week there is someone whose story touches her deeply, and whom she tries to touch in turn during the five minutes she is allowed to spend with him.

There is more, but this will do for now.

In any event, the bottom line is – has always been – that Wife is the most remarkable woman I have ever met. Every so often, when she frustrates or angers me past endurance, I have to pause and remember why I married her. And when I think of all these things, I sigh and reflect that – even if I had known just how high the cost was going to be – I probably would have decided to pay it anyway, to keep her from getting away. Young romantic love disdains to measure how heavy burdens are, before taking them on. And I suppose this is a good thing.

You always love the one you hurt

Looking back at the week of tumultuous e-mails that ended up with this one from D, I was struck by how much of the time I seemed to spend stepping on D's toes and then apologizing. Partly this is because I didn't know D well enough to know where all the landmines could be; partly, it is undoubtedly because she had at that point already fallen in love with me and was trying hard not to say anything ... so she was extra-sensitive from the get-go.

But what really struck me in retrospect was the effect that this dynamic had on me. I think it does not go too far to say that I found myself more tenderly inclined towards her the more often I had to apologize for having said something that hurt her feelings.

This is truly amazing, if not crazy.

I should add that I don't think this works all the time. I could imagine an obnoxious neighbor always yelling at me over imagined slights, and I don't think it would have the same effect. [In fact, my neighbors are just great, but you know what I mean.] If I hadn't already been very fond of D, I don't think I would have cared about her opinion nearly as much.

But why should it work at all? Thinking about it briefly, here is my first theory. When I apologize for hurting somebody else's feelings, I find -- if, as I say, she is somebody I already care about -- that part of the apology is to say, "Of course I could never have meant to hurt you because I am so fond of you ...." Then it is almost as if my heart hears what I am saying and decides to ratchet up her standings in my affections by just a bit -- in response to hearing what I said. Or here is a second theory. When I hurt somebody's feelings, I get distressed about it (in a small way, to be sure) because I don't want to hurt other people. Then the juxtaposition of the pain (of having caused offense) and pleasure (since this is someone of whom I am already fond) creates an amplification of whatever feeling was there before, and my heart (being pretty simple-minded) interprets that amplification as heightened affection.

Of course both theories are probably muddled, if not rubbish. But somehow my heart seems to work this way. It is very confusing. It may partly explain why I seem disproportionately likely to get attached to high-maintenance women (I mean emotionally high-maintenance) ... Wife herself being the prime example, of course, but D and some early girlfriends also come to mind.

I was a little reassured when I saw today's post from Ms. Inconspicuous, which contained the following lines (in a very different context): "So, you see, we were both out swinging. Which led to debate. Which led to a spat. Which led to apologies. Which led to a softening of conversation and some trust." But I still kind of wonder: Do other people find the same thing? Is this a well-known step in the dance of affection? Should I have recognized this interplay between hurt and tenderness long ago? Or am I just slightly deranged?

In any event, there you have it. Anybody who ever decides she wants me to fall for her now has a technique ready to hand. I figure it is safe to explain it here, because nobody in blogland will have the slightest interest. (On top of which, none of you knows where I live.) But for someone who did have an interest, it seems like all she would have to do is ...

... Pick a fight.

Sheesh.

.

Counseling 12

Wife was late and spent the first 15 minutes after she arrived talking compulsively about trivia. Fortunately I had been briefed by D (who talks to Wife regularly on the phone these days) what to expect on the agenda; so I declined to engage with the trivia and asked Wife if this was really what she wanted to talk about.

What she wanted to talk about, in reality, was whether she could travel to the Old Country to visit Boyfriend 5 and his family. She mentioned that she could use D's sister's frequent flyer miles, even if she had to supplement them with some of ours somehow. She said she had waited until the appointment with Counselor to raise the question, because she was afraid that I would get mad. I reminded her, in turn, that I had suggested exactly this a few months ago. I explained that I had concerns -- based on my strong suspicions that Boyfriend 5 is a fraud -- that if she made the trip then bad things could happen to her. But I also added that of course I can't stop her: she's a big girl with her own credit cards, so she can do what she wants.

A couple more details. After some prodding from Counselor, I admitted a second layer of concern -- namely, the normal "jealous husband" concerns in case the whole storyline with Boyfriend 5 turns out true. Wife agreed that maybe we could figure out some ways of reducing the risks that worry me most. And she also said something odd ... namely, that she didn't want me to use this trip as an occasion to demand she choose between us. Now whatever made her think that? I can't say.

But something I noticed is that I didn't feel any of the anxiety I normally feel when we discuss these sorts of things. It was routine ... not quite boring, but almost. And I'm not sure what that means. Is it just that this kind of discussion has become so commonplace between us? Is it that I think everything she says is a bluff? Or is it that I am starting not to worry if she decides to up and leave? And if the last, is it because the purple romantic prose I get (at this point) every day from D in e-mail makes me figure I can live without Wife? Or what?

I don't know what is causing it, but that unconcern is itself more concerning than anything that was said today.

Jane's conscience

I was thinking about the fact that I haven't posted anything in a couple of days, and realized that I have nonetheless been writing a lot. It just hasn't taken the form of an actual post. Part of this has been a series of e-mails with Veni that I hope we can post as a dialog some time down the road. And a lot of it has also been in a series of comments to a post here by Jane Doe about her conscience. It's a little off-topic from the main themes of this blog, but not completely. Anyway, this is to salve my own conscience by letting you know that I have still been actively at work at the keyboard. I've also been exchanging mail with D ....

E-mails with D: I love you

So far, I have extracted three substantial threads from my discussions with Wife’s good friend D. (See the posts here, here, and here.) A fourth has started – as I have asked her what she thinks of the relationship with Boyfriend 5 – but I have to table it for the moment because it has hit an fairly unsatisfying dead end. Maybe I can get something out of it later.

In the meantime, though, something else was going on. Because I have extracted chunks of text from D and not given the whole e-mails intact, I have had to cut out some of the stylistic touches, the asides, the salutations, and so forth. And over the last couple of weeks, these have taken on more and more a very particular color. I have to add that, being a simple-minded fellow but a gifted mimic, I soon found myself writing in the same way.

OK, scratch that. There is something – not a lot – to the "gifted mimic" part, but I wasn’t purely simple-minded about it. At first I thought she was just being colorful; after a while I was pretty sure it was more than that, and I had to weigh what I thought I should be saying back to her – but also, truth to tell, what I wanted to say back to her. And this got more and more delicate over time.

I had better start giving you some concrete examples, so you have some idea what I am talking about. As always, I have put D’s words in blue and mine in green.

It started off simply enough. After her visit (reported back here) I dropped her a note as follows:

Hi D!
Just wanted to drop you a quick note. [text snipped] ... It was great to see you. Your visits are always too short. All our love ....
Best regards,
Hosea

She replied:

Dear Hosea,
Thanks so much for writing; it was wonderful to hear from you!
[text snipped]
To honor honesty, I should tell you how impressed I was during my last visit by your energy, your ability to laugh and love, and your reference to those elements of life-the Greeks, family, intellectual zest and knowledge in diverse fields-that have inspired you for as long as I've been privileged to know you. You seem to me to have come to a point of wisdom and surprising youthfulness after a period of great trial and difficulty. I honor and respect you; I feel fortunate to call you 'friend'.
Take care; Godspeed.
D

A little while later, she wrote asking if I could suggest books on a certain subject for a student, and it was all straightforward:

Dear Hosea
I hope you are well!
[text snipped]
Take care, be well, and thanks for any help you can provide.
D

And I answered:

Dear D,
So good to hear from you again.
[text snipped]
Love as always,
Hosea

But then I sent her the letter quoted here and got back the reply quoted in the same post. And here is where things seemed to change a little. Partly this is because we were discussing much heavier things – the kinds of things I write about here. By the end of one of those letters, I found myself emotionally pretty drained, and I assume it was similar on D’s side. And this affects how we wrote. Leaving aside all the substance to focus on the trivia of salutations and conclusions, we now had ...

Dear D,
[text]
Love as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
Take care; Godspeed.
Love,
D.

My dear D,
[text]
Love,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
Godspeed and much love,
D

Dear D,
[text]
Lots and lots of love, as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[Text. This was the e-mail I discussed here, where D insisted that love could be sustained on the basis of words alone. However, I had earlier suggested that it made no sense for Wife’s frame of mind to be so warped by the impending mortality driven by her diseases (bear with me, it's off-topic right now); and D sharply disagreed, insisting on the centrality of physical life to any notion of the good or any kind of redemption. Again, mostly this is off-topic except that it sets up a remarkable last paragraph, as follows ....]
My children are right. I can't write emails, only letters. I trust you to take what is valuable from the rest; I hope that you know of my sustaining love for you. It's odd to even talk about love after writing about the importance, no, the necessity of physical love. I'm not sure what else to say. On some level, I do believe in love knit together by the appreciation for the gifts of mind and spirit. If it is not finally sustainable without the physical...that's something I will have to think about. I know I still feel your last embrace, hear your laughter, see your devoted boundary-setting with your children in my mind. Does that count?
With very much love,
D

Dear D,
[text]
With great love, as always,
Hosea

Dearest Hosea,
[text]
All my love,
D

Dear, dear D
[text]
I have to go for now. But my thoughts and my love go with this mail to you.
All my love,
Hosea

About this time, we got into something of a struggle about the topic I mentioned up above as a dead end. D had heard something from Wife that she thought explained part of the relationship with Boyfriend 5, but that wasn’t going to have any impact on the here-and-now. I wanted to know what it was, and D thought it would violate a confidence to tell me. We disagreed about this for a bit, and I pouted but said that of course if she didn’t think she could tell me then that was that. I was probably a little too sulky in the way I said it, because what I got back was:

Dearest Hosea,
Gosh, I'm really being mis-understood this time. I thought you were beginning to realize that I seem to be unable to deny you anything. Hosea, I simply don't make pronouncements that can't be discussed.
[text]
I would do almost anything to spare you fear and sadness. Right now, I share your sadness. What can I do to help you understand better?
All my love,
D

In my reply, I kind of fell all over myself apologizing because I really had been an immature prat in the way I had tried to pout information out of her. But then the next day we had the exchange of e-mails on the subject of child abuse, which I have reprinted here. That post contains four e-mails we exchanged the same day. The first two are reproduced in that post, complete and intact. The second two had some stuff sliced out, because it belongs here and not there, as follows. (I have repeated bits and pieces from what I quoted before, when it kind of belonged in both places.)

Dearest Hosea,

[first two paragraphs as given before]

As I suggested in an earlier email, I never truly knew you for years because Wife rarely said anything complimentary, and I spent little time with you. What happened that morning [several years ago when I was talking] with you was a true awakening, a clear and shining moment revealing why the well-being and concerns of yourself should claim my attention. Intuitively, I guessed what you might be, and despite your love and devotion for Wife, and the lack of any place in your affections for me outside of a certain enjoyment of my patience and autodidact turn of mind, it still seemed worthwhile to try and restore you to a place of honor within your own family, with my friend and your wife. I'm well aware that I have few tools to use, and even those might do more harm than good. But it seemed worthwhile to try. I honored and respected your desire to live honestly and your eighteenth century notion of honor and how a gentleman ought to behave even in the most difficult situations resonated deeply with me. If Boyfriend 5 was exposed, and Wife realized your love for her and responded with devotion and gratitude, that, I thought a little bleakly, might be reward enough for me

I am willing to make almost any sacrifice for you, but it is helpful to know what exactly is demanded. You should have told me about your depression and despair. My guess is my son, so like me, picked up your sadness and loneliness easily when he stayed with you. This afternoon, I saw a level of helplessness and and despair in you that remade the entire situation. It is not that I haven't read and re-read your letter. I believe who you say you are. I also, after today, know who you think you are. Hosea, I will give you to Wife, but not to despair. I'm not asking you to put me first, but I will say a third time, that the gift of my friendship and love should not be beyond you to accept.

My prayer? Let us be ourselves.

All my love,
D


Dear D,

Thank you. Very much.

This was a very difficult afternoon. And honestly, it has been a very difficult week. I have been surprised and startled enough this week that when I read your letter early this afternoon I have to confess I had no idea -- despite your many reassurances up till now -- what to expect.

"Surprised and startled"? Whatever for?

=====BEGIN LONG EXPLANATORY DIGRESSION=====

Where to begin? For years, our friendship (yours and mine) rested on a comparatively superficial level. I enjoyed your enthusiasm for ideas, and I was flattered by the fact that you listened to what I had to say and responded; but -- as you rightly point out -- we spent very little time together. As a result, you fell in my mind into the broad category of "Wife's Friends." Granted you were one of the most charming and delightful of the people in that category, but we saw each other rarely enough that the category was adequate.

Even more recently, we haven't spent a *lot* of time together, for the simple reason that we live [thousands of miles apart]. But the times we have spent together have recently been somewhat more concentrated ... intense ... than they were before. During this last visit, I have to wonder how Wife felt about it that you ostensibly came "to visit her" as being "her friend" and yet almost none of the conversation included her. Not that she was deliberately EXcluded, but it was as if she excluded herself ... or as if we were so busy talking to each other that she had little chance to break in. Maybe you remember it differently; but I felt a little funny about it at the time -- and I assume that if *I* felt funny about it, Wife must have felt ten times as funny. It did seem to me that I got a much more enthusiastic or demonstrative greeting and parting from you than she did. Did she notice that too? Did you?

And then, just in the last week when we have been mailing each other a lot, the whole verbal style of our mail has changed. Words like "dearest" and "all my love" can be simple conventional formulas to open and close letters, but they sound less like conventional formulas when the letters they bracket say things like "I still feel your last embrace" and "I seem to be unable to deny you anything." Now please understand, I'm not complaining or accusing: I've been writing in *exactly* the same way to you. I sit down at the keyboard, hear your voice in my head as I read your latest e-mail, and it seems like the only way to write ... the only way I *can* write. Only I think it is not how we *used* to write to each other, on the rare occasions that we did, and so I don't have a lot of familiar landmarks to orient myself. It has been difficult, in the last week, for me to know where I am.

On top of that, I have hurt you inadvertently more times in the last week, I think, than in the 18 years before that. I hate hurting people. I especially hate hurting people that I care about ... that I care about, indeed, more deeply than I long imagined. But it was always inadvertent ... which means that every single time I thought I was saying something innocuous right up until the moment you read it. And then somehow it turned into a weapon to wound you. The result is that it has been difficult, in the last week, for me to know what I am saying.

I think part of the reason I have hurt you so much and so often in the past week is precisely that, in many ways, I still don't know you very well, ... or at any rate not nearly well enough. If you tally up the hours we have spent in each other's company, the total number still isn't all that big. So you can use a word like "friendship" and to you it is quite clear what you mean by it. But I don't necessarily know for sure what friendship means TO YOU. As a result, I will say something -- out of uncertainty or anxiety or caution -- that genuinely hurts your feelings because you have already *said* you are my friend and it is perfectly obvious to you that *no* friend would ever do this or that. And when you say it, of course it is obvious to me too, and I feel terrible for having said something different. Only I didn't know until then that friendship really included this or that for you, since some people use the word without meaning those things. Or, in short, I have not always known what you are saying either.

In summary, this week, I have not been able to tell very clearly: (1) where we stand with respect to each other; (2) what I am saying to you; and (3) what you are saying to me. And this has left me singularly ill-equipped to know what to anticipate next.

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[Then there follows the substance of my second letter as posted below in green. But after wrapping up the stuff about Wife’s absurd allegations of child abuse, I concluded as follows.]

Last comment for now. Your very last words [above] are, "I will say a third time, that the gift of my friendship and love should not be beyond you to accept." I must beg you to understand that I *do* accept this so far as I understand it. Please, please, please recognize that any time I say or do something which looks to you like a sign that I have not accepted your friendship and love, it does *not* mean that. All it means is that I have not understood the connection between this thing (whatever I did or said) and your friendship and love. It's not that I am being stand-offish or disdainful. It is just that I don't know you well enough yet. So please be patient with me on this point.

I wish you were here. I think we could communicate better in person. Even the telephone isn't really good enough for this kind of conversation. Also, far more important, there is a kind of comfort in touch and presence that words cannot match -- the momentary pressure of fingers on a hand, the embrace when words fail, even just the quiet sitting together in the same room. I look at what I write on the screen, and it is never enough. Often it isn't even quite right. But touch and presence are not available to us right now, so words will have to do in their stead. Please forgive me and be patient with me when they fall short of the mark or miss it entirely.

I must close. Maybe later I will be able to see the whole of your letter below more clearly, so that I can answer it with more light, and with less storm and stress. Maybe later we can once again take up some of the other things we have talked about. But I am tired and grow inattentive. Best I close now, before I lose track of what I am saying.

All my love,
Hosea

And that brings us up as far as late Thursday night. Friday about lunchtime, I posted my quick note that the plot had thickened. That was the time that I got this e-mail.

Dearest Hosea,

Thank you.

Just a few comments before I get ready for school.

Hosea, I never meant to fall in love with you. If you feel awkward and unsure, know that we share this confusion. I knew I was close to the edge when I saw you last in [your city]. I left that evening because I realized I did not trust myself around you after Wife went to bed; I wanted you and was determined to spare you the net. Since you have loyalties which are more complex than mine, the conflict would be unsupportable. I might do you harm...it is certainly more than I could contemplate, and there are other factors against me, that you know of. I meant to shut the door, but I have not been able to do so very well, have I? I know from Wife that you have seriously considered establishing another relationship with a woman and using your home for meetings [WHAAAT??? See below!!]; I am not possessive, but my hunger is difficult to deny. It has been years since I have had sex; what I have with [my husband] is companionship, deep respect and laughter, but none of the passion I feel for you. At least you know the truth now; I seem unable to conceal much from you any more.

Slowly and with some reluctance, I think I will ask you to tell me about those years with Wife that [my son] glimpsed on his visit. I have long felt that those times were exceedingly dark. [My son] told me he spent hours in the shower, unable to stop his tears. He remembers your frustration and anger at his behavior. I was alarmed and frightened; for the first and only time, I called his priest ([my son] is Orthodox, you will remember) and asked for help. I removed him as soon as possible, and he ended his Latin lessons soon afterwards, although recently, he has discussed resuming them at [college] and perhaps majoring in history as well as chemistry. I will not ask [my son] about his visit; I trust whatever you are willing to tell me.

Perhaps a little light on how to go forward. Hosea, simply hold me to your standards of ethics and morality and see if I am worthy to be your friend. You don't just talk about friendship; you discuss the art of relationship in lucid paragraphs that could be lifted from a textbook, and then it's philosophy and then ten other subjects for as long as you have the patience to stay with me. I remember so clearly you quoting an entire page of Aristotle to help me build an argument, smiling, with the patience of a master. And you wonder why I am enamored? :-) I am quite willing to be held accountable to any standard you deem necessary and appropriate. You can probably assume that if your definition of friendship includes a certain virtue, mine either does, or needs to, and you can say that. What you really can't do, and what is hurtful, is to diminish my love by believing that somehow, while you grasp it intellectually, it is out of your reach physically and emotionally.

Yes, I wish we could touch each other. More than you know. I understand restraint is the remedy, but I occasionally, mutinously, think it also disposes of my happiness. Most of the time, I remind myself that I decided to put your interests and love for Wife before my own interests, and I remain committed to that objective. But you should not doubt that my sentiments are genuine and for you alone.

Take care, be well. Godspeed.

I love you,
D

Hosea....this never reached you this morning; email failure. I admit I am emotionally exhausted. The air seems to hurt my skin today; I'm over-sensitized and defenseless. I had the students write essays, which means endless paper grading for me, but it was all I could do. Even simple tasks seemed beyond me. My room-mate (I share a classroom) asked me to take a test he wrote for his standard U. S. class. I had to pause and focus when a question came up on the tariffs of the early nineteenth century-did they help foster sectionalism? Of course. But I had to think before I could even lock onto the question. I hope you are better rested and more confident. I haven't felt this insecure for a while. Sigh* Do take care.

And I had to decide how to respond to this! Well, fortunately, as I noted before, D and we live a long, long ways apart; so any practical decisions will have to wait regardless. But naturally I had to say something. Here is what I said:

Dear, dear D,

First things first: of course you are worthy to be my friend. Never doubt it for a moment. And never doubt that you have my love. I don't know what that will mean for us in the long term -- love is an infinitely protean thing, and the situation is a little complicated. :-) But you must know that I could not write to you the way I have all week -- the way I did last night! -- if you didn't have my love secure in your keeping. Indeed, I look at the last week and have to smile (through all the turmoil) at how shamelessly I have neglected my job at work in order to write you, read your replies, and write again. Hours, D, hours.

You ask (at least implicitly) about my standards of ethics and morality and friendship. It's a fair question, except that I try not to live my life according to a handbook. A principled life isn't like consulting a checklist: good, better, best, ... whoops, missed a box at item #4, three points off. It's more like just paying attention to what you are doing, with love and honesty: honesty foremost to yourself, and to others so far as it does not put you in direct peril. The down side is that it can be harder (this way) to decide what to do; the up side is that when you finally do decide, you truly know both that it is right and that it is what you want. Besides, checklists are awful things -- who wants to live by them? :-)

Over the past six months or so, I have spent a lot of time reading and commenting on a community of "infidelity blogs." These are blogs by people who are actively engaged in an affair, or who have had an affair in the past, or who are still physically faithful (for the moment) but are strongly contemplating an affair in the future. I think I may be the only regular commenter in this community who is writing from the other side of the bed, so to speak ... since my perspective is absolutely that of the "cheated-upon" (if that is a word). But you know, I like these people. I really like them. When you corrected me a few days ago on the question whether love could subsist entirely on words, I realized you were right because the people in this blog community know nothing else besides each other's words ... and yet, at some level, we can become friends. Do I believe in the importance of marriage as a permanent commitment? Obviously. Have I ever cheated on Wife? Never. But I wouldn't dream of criticizing these friends who have made different choices. All of them are wrestling with difficult stuff in their lives; the affairs are only part of that. Sometimes I might offer advice -- "You know, if you do X then I fear it could blow up in your face" -- but that's the only appropriate thing to say. I could never condemn them, because I know they are no worse than I am. All I can do is offer friendship and support as they struggle with their lives. And -- importantly -- they reciprocate. That's what friends do.

I'm only telling you this by way of saying that -- for me, at least -- it's not about "standards" as some kind of abstract principle carved on stone. It's just about love -- the whole spectrum from agape through philia to eros and especially all the interesting little grey zones in-between. :-) At one level true love *includes* standards -- because they are good for the beloved -- and a lot more besides. Of course, I have to admit that not only does true love include and impose standards, ... but sometimes it also inspires active mutiny against those very standards. ;-) Love can be very complicated.

D, dear, I have no idea where this leaves us. Right now, today, I have to agree that "awkward and unsure and confused" pretty well sums it up. For today and tomorrow and next week, it leaves us at any rate [living thousands of miles apart]. And I think that together we will have to figure out where the path leads after that. Right now, I'm not going to second-guess where that destination might turn out to be. But if we figure it out together in love and honesty, it will be right.

There is one point I must clear up. You wrote, "I know from Wife that you have seriously considered establishing another relationship with a woman and using your home for meetings." I have no idea where this came from, but it is absolutely false. I cannot imagine why Wife said such a thing. I don't even know who she's thinking of. I suppose, if I stretch my imagination, that the only person she could possibly have in mind is a co-worker in our IT department: she is a friendly woman, and once every couple of months we go out to have lunch together. But it's lunch. She and her husband are trying to adopt a child from China, so I commiserate with her about the frustrations of that process. I tell her, in turn, about the things you take for granted that change overnight when a baby enters the house. But that's it. And I am just guessing that this is who Wife means, because she is the only other woman with whom I have any significant social contact at all. I don't get out much. :-) Anyway, to jump from lunch to "another relationship" is purely false. If a private investigator had followed me around for a year and eavesdropped on every single word she and I have ever exchanged, he would have found nothing more incriminating than sandwiches and potato chips.

But now I start to wonder why Wife said this. I have no idea whether she KNOWS it is false, and is telling lies deliberately; or whether she has brooded on my (infrequent) lunches with this woman and jumped to conclusions; or what else it could possibly be. Any of the explanations I can think of would alarm me. The most I can say to account for something so bizarre is that it seems to be of a piece with the (more painful) discussion you and I had yesterday. Did she say anything to give you a clue of what her data source was? Did she say "I think that ..."? Or "Hosea told me that ..."? Or "I asked the Magic 8-Ball and it said ..."? Or did she not say? Any way you look at it, this is very, very strange.

I don't want to end on such a depressing note, however. Let me end, rather, with an attempt at encouragement. It is no surprise to me that the air hurt your skin today, because you started the day stripped bare and it is scary to feel so exposed. Here, take my jacket, wrap up in it, sit down by the fire with me, and get warm. I love you too. I don't know where we go from here, but be of good cheer -- we'll figure it out. And when we figure it out, it will be both right and what we want.

Bright blessings and all my love,
Hosea

So there you have it. That brings us up pretty much to the present. D is in love with me. I certainly love her too, although as I pointed out there are a lot of different kinds of love. At the moment I am not 100% sure which of the thousands of varieties this is. (Seems to me I remember having this problem in college!)

The odds are that it will be months before we have any opportunity to see each other again. Plenty of time to think and mull and plan. And I have been thinking already, some. But hey, since I’ve posted the story out there for all to read ... any thoughts? Comments?

Suggestions?

.