An armed camp, not a relationship
7/29/07
1250
Sun
Feeling just kind of bad right now. A sinking feeling inside that seems to get louder when I remember that we’re going to Vincent’s party this afternoon, when I think of this week coming up and how to fill it; when I think of Gary’s mom and that I’m going to need to call her soon to set up the particulars of a commitment I made to her a few months ago to go to the cadaver exhibit. It also has something to do with needing to call Sherry to see about making arrangements to see her in Idaho, and wanting to make arrangements for Connor ‘s friends to come. I feel a little closed in. I got the household chores done, except for the bathroom, which I’ll do later. I’m taking a break now but not sure how long it will last.
Part of it is about feeling that the last 15 years of marriage to Gary have been wasted in terms of most of it being just marking time and trying to figure out how to get by with what is.
I’ve been reading a book called “Living With the Passive Aggressive Man” and that has re-activated some feelings of resentment toward Gary: as if he’s been withholding sex from me as a way of expressing hostility. It’s more complex than that, including issues about my libido and his, and about the fact that any of the doorways he comes through turn off rather than nurtures any desire. The truth is, at least now, it isn’t as if I’ve been desiring him and he’s been withholding himself. Because I don’t desire him at all.
But I at least did have the investment in it to struggle actively against the prospect of a sexless marriage. I put up a fierce and impassioned fight to prevent this eventuality and I can’t say that he did. Maybe he responded by going along when I wanted counseling, but he himself did not express any upset about the road we were on, exhibited any commitment to reverse course. I feel sick that I’ve missed out on this part of life and reading this book has reminded me of that. I have successfully, more or less, managed to live with the pain of having a husband who doesn’t exhibit any dismay over not having a sexual life with me. I’ve actually believed that sex is overrated and that I can still count myself as having a life well lived even if that piece of it has been absent.
This really has been a serious situation, but he’s persisted in treating it as if it is not. And 15 years are gone. It makes me feel desperate, like a desire to go and seek a sex partner so that at least while I have some of my looks about me still and am reasonably still attractive I can have some of what I’ve lost to this black hole of Gary’s inaction.
I suppose this is at the heart of my feeling pulled down today. And feeling more sharply this hollow at the center of my life, in my primary relationship, makes me feel less outgoing about engaging the world. I’d rather get some of the comfort that being alone provides. So I do feel a sinking when I consider the social demands of being pleasant at a party, even with people I like. And more sunken when I consider doing something with Darlene, who I feel drained after an encounter with.
I’ve largely lived with this pain, managing it by getting used to it so I’m not as aware that it hurts. Distracting myself with the boys and with my writing. I suppose later I’ll pursue another theme about how important an active and satisfying sexual life really IS to consider a life well lived. That seems like a legitimate question. But a little off on a tangent from what I’m looking at here.
What I’m looking at here is the question of whether experiencing this pain now amounts to wallowing in self-pity and that I shouldn’t have picked up this book, or if it’s part of the ‘difficulties’ that needs to be confronted ‘on the way home’ as part of this hero’s journey? I said something about it lightly the other day, about having to deal with the grief of this, and perhaps this is an intimation that I’m not going to get away with an abstraction of grief. After all, it was something about another reality of Gary’s and my relationship that kicked off that whole emotional storm last May; the fact that we’re an armed camp, not a relationship. {and it was the notion of it being a template of sorts that led me to the consideration that Sharon and I were using our own relationship as a template through which to examine patterns in my life that put me over the dam}. I’m still not sure I’m getting the connection there.
My rationale for getting the book was an understanding that I am living with a passive aggressive man, and since I’ve pretty much decided to stay in this relationship I had an idea that I should acquaint myself with the nature of it: that is, arm myself with information about what I was facing as a part of the other growth work I’m doing that I’m hoping can empower me to live a happy life after abandoning the hope that things are going to change with Gary and me. I found the book in an incidental search, looking for something else.
(I just went and looked through my browser history to get a clue, and see that I’d followed a tangent about BPD—borderline personality disorder. I forget the direct link that took me there—I mean what caused me to look into BPD.)
The question is do I need to pay attention to this reactivated pain, which definitely alters the context in which I experience my life right now? Or have I just gone and done something that makes me feel worse, and this was a foolish thing for me to do, in fact I should feel bad for having been so foolish?
A larger context of this is that we went to the movies on Friday. I felt angry with Gary because Scott was wiggling and standing up and I was the only one addressing it. Gary could have been a member of some other family for all that he engaged in helping me to instruct Scott and insist on considerate movie-behavior. And yes, he held Scott in his lap for a while, but only because I directly instructed Scott to sit in Gary’s lap.
I suppose that was a microcosm, too, of parenting. The ideal, which doesn’t seem insanely idealized to me, is that we are co-participants in making sure our child is not an obstruction to others in enjoying a movie they’ve paid to see. I experience myself instead as playing both our parts, mother and father, while Gary is oblivious, and resenting him for it. What I feel our co-parenting has amounted to is that I am the executive and executor of parenting, and Gary plays a babysitting role. One of the manifestations of this is that the boys don’t behave respectfully toward Gary—because he doesn’t carry and wield the moral authority of a parent.
I suppose I felt an inkling too that maybe this is another expression of passive-aggressive behavior. To not act as a co-partner where we can easily switch off with parenting responsibilities. I mean effortlessly, like partners do in other venues. Alert to opportunities to participate in order to smooth the accomplishing of a task. A trapeze act where the partner is waiting and the timing right. There is a very different feel to being real partners than what Gary and I are doing with our boys. Even though he seems to think that it is sufficient to take the boys places so I have a bit of a break.
And I suppose I just experienced a microcosm of the dearth in true partnership just in having a conversation where we give a part of ourselves to each other. There was an example in the passive-aggressive book that Gary mirrored yesterday. Gary asked me how my evening had been with them at the soccer game and I started to tell him a little about feeling torn between several things I wanted to do, and about being drawn to the Bacevich story and to the statements that a prominent war critic made in the wake of his son’s being killed in that war. Gary answered by saying, “Did you ever take the boys to Subway?” Wow, that was nearly an identical story to what was told in the book: and what the author calls “confessional communication”, where one person confesses something personal about self, and this is in effect invites a corresponding ‘confession’ from the other person. When instead the answer is a nonsequitur with nothing to do with the subject, the effect is jarring. I realized in that microcosm of communication what I’m missing: in fact, over the past 15 years what’s been missing in what we could have been giving of ourselves to each other. The reality of our conversations is often that he says flippant things that don’t really make any sense and has the effect of alienating further conversation. Yesterday he wanted to know about any developments in a flap that’s been occurring over a major illness in our cousins’ side of the family. I’d talked with my brother and was just about to tell him when he said something in a weird child-like voice that almost aggressively shut down any attempt or desire I had to share with him.
Here are Gary and Scott.
I asked him last night if he felt our 15 years of marriage had been a waste. He said no and I challenged him to tell me what of value he has gotten, besides our children, from being married to me. What of value he’d received from me.
Quick recap of last night’s dream, most of which I’ve forgotten. Maybe I was at the community college campus, but there was something very important about NW 185th. There was something I was missing, and I thought I’d be able to find by driving south on 185th and turning left. There are a couple of different shopping centers as you drive south, and I was trying to think if I could get what I needed at one of those. I thought I could. Then I’m in a car with Gary and we’ve driven down 185th and turned right at one of the major roads. Then we make a quick turn to go north again on 220th (I don’t know if there really is such a road but it was there in my dream). We had to turn quickly because it wasn’t well marked and we almost missed it. There was something I was doubting about Gary.
