You can kind of tell these things

Wife has been spending a lot of time lately on the phone with her friend Leia, because Leia is breaking up with her live-in boyfriend of the last 10 years and is having a rough time of it. More exactly, Leia has been supporting this fellow for the last 10 years, and she is finally throwing him out. But she is having a lot of anxiety and heartbreak over doing so. Leia, like Wife, has serious longterm health issues, and her boyfriend has looked after her through many of her illnesses. Also, Leia is in her 50's by now, and is afraid of living alone the rest of her life. So why throw this man out? Gosh, let's see ....

• He has a difficult relationship with his ex-wife, who sounds psychotic from everything I have heard. (To be fair, I only hear what Wife tells me that Leia has told her, so who really knows?) But Leia gets caught in the crossfire.
• He has a difficult relationship with his children. (I forget how old they are now, but they are all by his ex-wife; if he has been with Leia for 10 years, they can't be exactly kids.)
• He doesn't seem to be able to get or hold a job, notwithstanding an impressive technical background.
• He has a chronic gambling addiction. This has been a problem for Leia for some years now, actually.
• He visits prostitutes. (This one was news to me.)

Real winner, huh? What a great guy ... how could Leia ever think of throwing him out? [insert sarcastic roll of the eyes here]

More seriously, how could he have kept all these facts hidden way back when Leia was first getting involved with him?

If I remember right, he didn't. Oh, the bit about prostitutes was news to me. And the gambling addiction may not have been visible a full 10 years ago, although Leia has been struggling with it (and him) for several years by now. But I'm sure I remember Wife talking to me way back then, after she would get off the phone with Leia or after Leia would drop by to visit us, saying how concerned she was that this "new boyfriend" seemed to have a lot of dangerous flaws and that Leia could end up getting seriously used or badly hurt. Or both. I don't remember all the details of these conversations -- I was only listening with half my attention, and they were (after all) a decade ago -- but I would be reasonably confident in vouching for this much.

So what happened? If all these risks were visible up front, why did Leia let this jerk move into her pants and her house in the first place?

I think she just chose not to see them, or to minimize them. Wife says she didn't want to say anything for fear of alienating her friend, so she didn't actually announce "Leia, you are walking into a field of land mines." But the only way Wife could have known about these problems is if she heard them from Leia -- it's not like she ever met this guy in person. Leia lives several hundred miles from here, but her elderly mother is in the same town where we are. So she comes to visit here several times a year. We've never been there. Wife calls but hasn't flown out. In other words, Leia saw the same warning signs Wife did, registered them consciously enough that she told Wife all about them, and then marched forward anyway. Something -- maybe infatuation, maybe fear of being alone -- overcame any kind of reasonable caution. Yes, it is terrible to see the meltdown of a relationship; but often, even at the beginning, you can kind of tell these things about each other.

And after all, isn't that exactly what I did with Wife? I knew a lot about her before we ever married. (Not before we started fucking, but that's because we started fucking the second time we met.) I knew that she complained a lot, that she could fly into irrational rages about little shit, that she lied casually (at least to her mother), that she said horrible things about her family behind their backs, that she needed a lot of care and maintenance. I knew all these things, and despite them all I stood up and said "I do." I made excuses for her; I told myself she would get better; I believed that somehow -- if only I were strong enough to hang in there and if only I could love her enough -- she would change and we could live happily ever after. It's true I didn't understand how unlikely people are to change the truly fundamental aspects of their characters; but I surely did understand what her character was like. I just ignored what I knew.

I recently heard from yet another friend who just broke up with her lover (a married man this time) after finding out about his other mistress, and his many short flings, and the prostitutes he has frequented, and ... and ... and .... She writes that all the signs were there in front of her long ago, and she can't understand how she ignored them all for so long. What was she thinking?

But I'm not surprised. It happened to Leia, it happened to me, ... why not her too? Why not all of us? The fact is that really, often, you can kind of tell these things right from the beginning. And then you can ignore everything that you see and know. Not too encouraging, is it?

Quotable quotes

So yesterday I was sitting petting one of the cats, who was purring and stretching out and rolling over, stretching his neck so I could scratch it and just generally soaking up all the petting he could get.

And Wife said, "You know, that cat is really love-y to you and Son 1; even somewhat to Son 2. But he sure is standoffish to me. Maybe it's because I'm the only one who kicks him, to get him to stop clawing my stuff."

Gosh, ya think?
__________

Then this morning I had another one of these long, pointless conversations with Wife. Somewhere towards the end she said that she "walks on eggshells" because she is afraid of my getting mad at her, and I said this was ridiculous. Now that we have separated our money, I no longer get mad at how she spent hers; and now that we have no sex life, I no longer get mad at whatever she wants to do with her body (or with whom).

She interrupted, "I have NO sex life right now!" And then added quickly, "Can YOU say the same?"

I stumbled for a moment with surprise and then said, "Let me get back to the point I was making ...!"

On lying, part 8. Wife's handgun, redux

A few weeks ago, when Boyfriend 4 died, Wife was talking on the phone with Estelle, his widow. This phone call was the very day he died -- he was (so to speak) not yet cold -- and Wife asked Estelle about her handgun. (I don't remember if I told you that when I took Wife's handgun away for safekeeping, B4 and I agreed to tell her that he had it.) That she should choose such a time to press such a point is ghastly by itself, of course. But what made it worse for Estelle is that she knew she didn't have it. She wrote to me as follows:

I know that you and B4 had spoken of concern for your wife and having a handgun in the home where your boys are. And I understand that concern, having daughters of my own.

B4 told me of you removing the gun from the home and giving it to another friend- and saying it was with him. He understands the reasons behind that - and I know he would have kept the gun for her if only he had been able to get it and hold it.

She asked me about her .38 last night- I tapdanced around the subject, telling her that I had not sorted through his guns yet(true)and that as soon as I located it and his father and I finished discussing things that if it WAS in his things I would contact her about it.

You and I know that B4 did not have this firearm. It is my suggestion that you go to her and tell her that he did not have it when he died. As to returning it to her- that is going to be up to you and at your discretion.

B4 told me how troubled he was over this deception. He fretted over being asked for the gun someday and having to decide whether or not to tell her the truth. He loved your wife VERY much- and your boys- and you. To have to fib to someone he loved so much- even for their own good- bothered him.
Please- in memory of your good friend- tell your wife that he did not have the gun in his possession and I do not have it in mine.

I wish you all no ill and all the best-

Estelle

So, a couple of days later, I did just that. I told that it has been here at the house all along, squirrelled away in the garage somewhere (which it isn't, but good luck proving THAT wrong!).

The conversation did not go very well. She was angry that B4 had lied to her; I have to admit that I was fairly callous about this, and just said, "Fine. Call him up to yell at him about it." She repeated many of her usual remarks about how it's her property and she doesn't plan to shoot me with it, etc etc etc. No surprise there, as she always says the same thing. Then she said something else, however: that up until "about a year ago," she accepted implicitly that anything I told her was the truth, and that this had allowed me to get really self-righteous about condeming all the lies she has told to me; but now she has "realized that's not at all true." And she more or less asked me what I had to say for myself about that.

I replied by telling her that she was absolutizing: that there is a lot of ground between "Everything Hosea says is true" and "Everything Hosea says is false." And I pointed out that I have never been a Kantian in ethics. Kant famously said once that the moral obligation to tell the truth was so absolute that if a crazy man comes to your door looking to murder Mr. Smith, and you know where Mr. Smith is, you are not morally permitted to lie to the crazy man about his location. (Somehow I don't think Kant can have possibly understood what he was saying when he said this; and in any event, after some of the catastrophes of the twentieth century that example looks very different.) As I say, I denied to her that I was ever that kind of a Kantian in ethics. I contrasted Plato's more nuanced approach in Book 1 of the Republic, where someone argues that justice means giving people what you owe them, and Socrates poses this example: Suppose a friend of yours deposits his weapons with you to keep for him; and then one day he goes crazy, and (while crazy) he asks for them back. Does anyone believe that justice requires you give them back to him while he is out of his mind? Because that is surely "paying back what you owe." But everyone clearly agrees that the answer is No, you don't give them back while he is out of his mind, so justice must be something else. By the same token, I said, I have to exercise prudence in what I say when I think there is some kind of clear and present danger. Wife scoffed at the suggestion that she could ever pose a clear and present danger to anybody, and I just said that we see it differently.

Of course, there is more to the story. In fact, the risk of danger to life and limb is not the only reason for me to mislead her these days. There is also my relationship with D, not to put too fine a point on it. Wife recently characterized that relationship with remarkable acuity. She started by repeating her theory that maybe this is all a mid-life crisis, but then focussed in to suggest that all along I hadn't been getting what I wanted out of the marriage, and that I had resigned myself to not getting it; but then along came D and I realized it is possible for me to get all those things after all, and so I became angry at having wasted so many years. On the other hand, I'm not sure if she realizes yet that we meet each other throughout the year, and that it is a physical relationship as well as an emotional one. And of course I am in no hurry to tell her.

I discussed this all far better (at a theoretical level) in my last installment ["On lying, part 7"]. But I thought the update about this latest conversation might be relevant too.

A call from the psychiatrist

Not long after the last conversation I reported [see "Do you like being blackmailed?"], Wife took her evening pills and fell into bed. And a few minutes after that, the phone rang. I picked it up out in the kitchen at the same time that she picked it up in the bedroom. I said, "Hello?" She said, "Uh-h-h-h-o-o-o?" The voice on the other end of the line asked for her fairly brusquely. I said, "She's pretty tired right now." She said, "-a-a-a-at's me-e-e-e." I didn't hang up until the voice identified himself as her psychiatrist, and pretty peremptorily asked me to get off the line. So I got.

But from there I walked into the bedroom, to see how this conversation was going. Not well. Wife was lying face down on the bed, with the phone leaning against one ear, grunting "Uh-huh" at rare intervals. Her psychiatrist seemed to be trying to talk to her, but no such luck. [Readers will remember that this is exactly how she gets every night once she takes her sleeping medication. See, e.g., "Calling the paramedics."] Finally I picked up the phone and introduced myself to her psychiatrist. I had been able to overhear that he was trying -- with some considerable degree of concern -- to figure out what was going on with her and why she was so incoherent. What pills had she taken? I explained that I hadn't watched her take them, but that she is like this every night at about this time. He clarified -- more than once -- that he was worried lest she had taken a deliberate overdose of something (presumably he meant one of her narcotics). I answered, again, that I couldn't swear in a court of law to exactly what she had taken this night in particular, but in general she is very much a creature of habit when it comes to her pills and her incoherence tonight is absolutely consistent with the way she is every other night.

He said a couple of other things, all of which were innocuous enough by themselves but interesting in combination. First, he made it very clear that patient privacy laws forbid him to discuss her case with anybody else, so of course he couldn't say anything to me. But then he added that there is no law preventing him from listening [to me, that is], and sometimes that might be useful since all he ever hears is "one side of the story." He repeated that his concern tonight was to make sure she hadn't taken a deliberate overdose of anything; and while that would obviously have been anybody's concern once he heard how slurred her speech was, he never once said, "Also I need to reschedule our appointment next week so please have her call me tomorrow." The unstated implication, I think, has to be that the reason he dialed the phone tonight in the first place was out of a fear that she might be deliberately overdosing. And that, in turn, makes me guess (without his having said so) that she has said something to worry him.

In the end, he asked me to keep an eye on her tonight, just to make sure that she continues to look routine. (She has and does.) I gave him my cell phone number, in case I could be of any further help. He fumbled a little awkwardly at the offer, since of course he can't call me up to say, "Wife tells me that XYZ, and what is your side of the story?" But he took the number down. And then immediately he gave me his cell phone number too. Now, it might have been just a polite gesture, of course. But I wonder.

I'm not completely sure about all of what this conversation meant, but somehow I think it was important.

Do you like being blackmailed?

Another silly argument that started at the dinner table .... Honestly, if we all just gave up eating, we'd probably argue less. (joke)

Dinner is winding down. Son 1 starts making belching noises, on purpose. Wife scolds him to stop but he takes no notice. Not to be outdone, Son 2 lets out a long, noisy fart, making it obvious that he could have held it in had he wanted to. I send him away from the table for a few minutes, and when he comes back he is sulky. So sulky, in fact, that he decides he no longer wants the third helpings of dinner he had been asking for previously, but wants to get down from the table to finish his homework. (Damned good thing, too, because as it is the homework took him till quite late. And why did you wait this long to wrap up the assignment? Don't ask questions like that, Hosea ....)

Once he leaves the table, Wife picks up her usual refrain: "I don't want the boys to have to leave the table hungry."

Oh for heaven's sake. How many times have we gone over this? I steer her into the back room and then ask her point-blank, "Do you like being blackmailed?"

Wife: No, ... why?

Hosea: Because you are inviting it. Every time you refuse to send one of the boys away from the table for inappropriate behavior, all because you are so afraid that he might be a little hungry, you are pasting a sign on your back that says "Blackmail me!" And you are announcing to them that you won't and can't enforce any discipline whatever, because you won't and can't impose any consequences, because all they have to do is claim to be hungry and you cave in. And that means that you have given up being the adult.

Wife: Well I don't want them to be malnourished.

Hosea: Right, but they're not. Look at them -- they are the picture of health! Over the long haul of a week at a time, they aren't going to miss the food they need. And if they eat a little less this meal and a little more next meal, it's no big deal. They are fine. [And I ask readers to remember that Son 2, whose sulk started all this, had already had an entree, two vegetables, and second helpings on the entree. Honestly, malnutrition was not a risk for him tonight.]

Wife: But I don't want them to be hungry.

Hosea: Right, but as a result the boys know perfectly well that you will never enforce any rules at the table, and so they ignore you. You scolded Son 1 for deliberately belching -- did he stop?

Wife: No, he did it again.

Hosea: Right. He knows he doesn't have to mind you, because you won't enforce rules at the table. All they have to do is say "I'm hungry" and they can wrap you around their little fingers. But that means you have surrendered. You have given up being the adult. You have given up being in charge. And that means that when I am not around -- say, when I am travelling for work -- they are in charge. In practical terms, it means Son 1 is in charge, because he is the older. And he is eager for that. Look at him -- he wants to be in charge. And you don't. So you have given up being the adult. Is that what you want?

Wife: N-n-no-o-o-o ....

Hosea: But it is what you've got, by your lack of enforcement of any standards. I mean, which do you want more? Do you want to guarantee that they never experience even the slightest bit of hunger? Or do you want to be the adult? Because you can't do both. You have to choose.

Wife: Of course if you put it that way, then I want to be the adult.

Hosea: Fine, but that's not free. Then you have to stop obsessing over the risk that one of them might be the slightest bit hungry when he leaves the table.

Wife: But I don't want them to be hungry.

Hosea: You can't have it both ways. Choose.

Wife: Well right now I'm tired, so I choose to go to bed.

Hosea: Fine, you can go to bed. Just understand that this isn't one of those choices you can put off till later. One way or another, you will choose -- you do choose. If you don't make a point of choosing to be the parent, with all that entails, then you are inescapably choosing to let them be the parents when I'm not home ... or at least to let Son 1 be the parent. It is very much an Existentialist situation. You can't put it off to another day.

Haven't I said all this before? Probably. I forget what I have said to her, and what I have ranted inside the confines of my own skull. But she was pretty tired, and I bet she didn't understand it. She probably wouldn't have understood it even if wide awake. I don't know why not.

Don't try this at home

OK, this is just silly. But apparently police have just arrested and charged a woman in Batavia, New York, with adultery. She is -- are you sitting down? -- only the thirteenth person ever charged with adultery as a criminal offense (a misdemeanor) in the history of New York State.

That's quite a record for the state, honestly. Only twelve others? And of those, only five have been convicted.

I guess having sex on a park bench in broad daylight in the middle of the afternoon might be a bit of a giveaway? Just a thought.

You can read the story here. I don't make this stuff up, you know .... I'm not nearly that inventive.

John and Iris 2, sex and lies and "violence of mind"

A while ago, I wrote about seeing the movie Iris about Iris Murdoch: mainly about her descent into Alzheimer's disease, but with extensive flashbacks to her earlier life. So on a whim yesterday, I looked up her Wikipedia article. In it, I found a link to a review of A. N. Wilson's memoir of her, published some seven years ago. (You can find it here or here.)

Of course the article is in the first instance about A. N. Wilson's book. But I think what it says about Iris in the process is fascinating -- particularly how the multiple sides of her personality all genuinely fit together. So on the one hand, this reviewer genuinely credits Iris with the luminous intelligence, the humor, the wisdom, and the lack of ego that were so widely remarked on by everybody; but then at the same time she apparently exhibited, equally certainly, a voracious promiscuity, "violence of mind", patterns of betrayal, "shameless and habitual social lying", and a "weakness for cruelty."

It is a complicated picture, and I wish I understood it better. Sometimes when I read about Iris, I am powerfully reminded of the "high-maintenance women" I have found my life orbiting around. In Wife, I can see the patterns of betrayal and the habitual lying; in D, the overpowering sexuality and -- again -- at least a real gift for falsehood. I'm not sure what "violence of mind" means, and I'm not sure if either of them has a "weakness for cruelty." I do know that Wife has confessed dark and cruel fantasies to me (just once), and she has certainly been willing to play along with the S&M fantasies of Boyfriend 5 and Friend and the gang. D has alluded to dark corners in her own soul, but I haven't had time to see them yet.

I know that years ago -- back when I still loved Wife a lot more than I do now -- I had already come to grips with the idea that the things I admired about her were connected at a deep level with these profoundly unsavory facts. If anything, I speculated that the two sides might be inseparable; that the lies and betrayal and infidelities might be somehow simply the flip side of the energy that allowed her to hit the peaks she sometimes hit. [See, e.g., "Eight things I love about Wife."] The other image I toyed with was that of beautiful flowers fertilized with shit. Either way, I had long since some to accept that it was possible for these two sides to coexist, even if I didn't understand it clearly.

This line of thought with respect to Wife, in turn, goes a long way to explain why I am not shocked by D's phenomenal sexuality. I almost think she expected me to be a little shocked, at first, because it is so overwhelming; and I think she is still a little taken aback when I remind her as a matter of course that this is simply who she is at the deepest level ... and so she might as well embrace it as a Calling of some kind, because it's not like she'll ever be able to set it down and walk away. But of course I had long before accepted that the inner truth of even the most admirable person won't come close to resembling the Disney cartoon that we all try to show in public. So it has never been any big deal.

I still don't understand it very well.