Worst case scenario

Journal spun's Journal: Worst case scenario 8

Journal by spun on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @02:38AM

Well it's official. We're breaking up. I just wish my wife had handled things a little more elegantly. Part of the reason I'm into polyamory is that by promoting honesty and open communications in all things, at least in theory, it can protect against that punched in the gut feeling of shock and betrayal that heralds the end of many a relationship.

We had scheduled a date night on Saturday and we had plans to just hang out all day Sunday. She'd spent Friday night with Mr. Y., and she was conducting rehearsals for the play she's directing Saturday during the day, but we'd planned to have a nice night. I'd make dinner and pick out a couple movies for us, nothing too special.

She called and said rehearsal was running late. Then she called and said she and some of the cast (including Mr. Y.) were at the bar across from the theater and would I like to come. Then she called and said that would be too awkward, I shouldn't come and she'd be at least another hour. I was quite unhappy with that, and said as much. We had made a date, you don't blow that off. Not with business, not with friends, and certainly not your spouse or partner.

She said she couldn't stand me. Now, she had been drinking and she was obviously feeling, how shall I put this? Uppity. A loaded word, I know, allow me to explain. She has always had a problem asserting herself, she's felt unloved and unloveable. When I first met her ten years ago, she would apologize for everything. All the time. Seriously, the words "I'm sorry" came out of her mouth every ten minutes without exageration.

When I first hooked up with her seven years ago, she'd never had a relationship before. Occasional fuck buddies, not even proper dating. At the age of twenty five. She'd always been overweight, even as a young kid. When I met her she weighed 160, which is a fine weight for a woman, especially when she is as curvy as my wife. She's beautiful, nice tits, a full round ass, perfect hip to waist ratio, shapely legs and feet, and a pretty face. But fat, according to society, and she had always felt ugly, which is a self fulfilling feeling.

So now, I've helped her feel better about herself. You must know, there are no quick fixes in personal growth and change. When I say that, I mean over the course of the last seven years I have helped her grow into herself as a person, to become more driven by who she is and less by her fear and hurt. By little, day to day actions, consistently, over the course of years. It's the only way to change yourself or others.

And now she can assert herself, but she goes a little overboard. Especially when she drinks. So, she's been drinking, she's having fun with her peers, who by all accounts think she is simply the most fabulous, absolutely the most talented and most fun director they've ever worked with. And I am her fuddy duddy old husband, asking her for a boring old night at home.

Now can you see the shape of things? The impending horribleness actually has very little to do with Mr. Y. though he was there. So she said she couldn't stand me, that she couldn't stand being around me. I was in shock, and I asked her what she meant, did she want to leave me? She said yes, she wanted to leave me. Details become fuzzy at this point.

I remember getting very, very angry. I remember saying things I regret, saying I would hurt her, embarass her, make her life difficult. Too much in shock to realize that I had no intention of really doing anything like that, that I just wanted to assert that I still had some kind of control over the situation. That she needed me.

Then I did the obvious next bad move, I drove over there and embarassed myself. Needed closure, had to discuss things immediately, what about the dog, had she thought this all through? Perhaps some of you have been there before. She wanted the management to call the cops on me, though I was outwardly relatively calm. Her friends wanted me to leave. Mr. Y. didn't have anything to say, which was a smart move on his part. So, extracting a promise that she would talk to me by one on Sunday, I left.

I went home and played a very mechanical, nay, robotic game of Civ IV. Alternating with bouts of crying and pacing around the house shaking with rage. This whole thing has been a good lesson in anger for me. Sometimes, you think you've learned to control something when all you've learned to do is repress it. Sometimes it's okay to be angry, to feel it, to be in that space. It's what you do with that feeling, especially the words you use to explain it to yourself as it's happening, that then determine what you do externally. That can turn that feeling which is essentially neutral into something good or bad. Good, say, when defending your spouse and children against an enemy. Bad when you say or do things you later regret.

The next day she wouldn't come over to talk until I threatened to toss all her stuff on the porch, call her parents, and write a letter to the theater owner explaining why I wouldn't be volunteering there any more, in lurid details. Star director and actress sleeping with a board member, the shock! Well you can imagine how well that talk went. I'm very ashamed of all this. Shame is usually a sign you should be talking about it. That's what this is, in part, a public confessional. Pardon the mess.

By the next day, I had managed to forgive her. Forgiveness, by the way, is something you do for yourself. It is not for the other person, I can't stress that enough. You will not be able to stop hurting yourself with bad thought-loops until you forgive. Trust me, I had to forgive a pack of thughs for taking my left eye from me, I know these things.

But forgiveness leads to compassion, and compassion leads to understanding. And suddenly I wanted her back. Badly. We just moved here two years ago and outside of the theater circles here I haven't met many people. And those are, of course, her circles and her people and I don't fit in there without her. I'm a computer geek, not a theater geek. I tried, acting, lighting, its fun for a bit but never really did anything for me. It's her whole life. So me, I'm looking at a near future that's pretty bleak and lonely, until I get back into my bachelor habits and start focusing on the things I like, rather than us, and our plans, and her projects, and her problems...

I call her, tell her she's off the hook, I forgive her, I'm not going to "make her suffer the natural consequences of some piss poor decisions" as I believe I phrased it at one point in some lame attempt to justify being a bastard. And I had let her know previously, in no uncertain terms, that this all could have gone smoother if it weren't for her callous insensitivity and blatant disregard for the feelings of me, her friend, her confidant, her mentor and (lately) student, her fellow traveller on the path, her partner of seven years. I do like to pile it on sometimes.

I mean really, we'd had a talk, the three of us, the "could it just be Mr Y. and Jenny?" talk, and it was certainly on the table if that's the way things needed to go down. But the assumption I had was that it would happen with a little more dignity than it did. In hindsight, I suppose a lot of the lack of dignity was on my part. But I still think she could have picked a better method.

I call her and tell her to take some time. We don't have to do anything drastic right away. Then I get lonely and start texting her. So lonely, can't do this. That sort of thing. Blargh. The thing that sucks is that I know better. All of it, it's just me indulging myself. I know how to get myself out of it all, but why should I, damn it, am I not entitled to wallow? Am I not entitled to rage? Just a little?

It's been my downfall in this relationship. Here's a tip. Trying to use the "lowering yourself to their level to show them what it's like so they can learn" method is doomed to fail. And it can become a habit. She and I have always been very honest and open with each other. That has its flip side. You're armed to the teeth. Add that to the whole prone to lowering yourself to their level bit and you've got yourself an unstable situation. All you need is a trigger.

Need to wrap this up. Near midnight, and I've got work in the morning. She called me at 2:30 in the morning last night. She'd had a fight with Mr. Y. Could she take everything back, and come back to me? Woken out of a deep sleep, I babbled yes of course. She called back five minutes later to say forget it. So Tuesday was not a good day for me, either. I'd just managed to start forgiving, then she has the nerve to pull something like that.

So I made her call her parents tonight. And I made her not lie to them about the situation. Call it revenge. I wish I could claim it was just justice, or the right thing to do. Then I wrote them an email, explained the situation, begged their forgiveness for both of us, asked them not to be mad at her especially. My mom has known about the whole situation all along, my dad I don't really talk to, but I had really been enjoying having them as in-laws, and they are kind of conservative socially. Churchgoing democrats in a republican state and city. Nice people.

I told them I'd forgiven her, that I would always love her, and maybe she and I could be friends some day. And I cc'd her. Sigh. I'd hoped to add some moral at the end here, some jaunty little lesson, but frankly I'm a little tired. It can wait. Another day, another jaunty little lesson. It just keeps happening until it stops happening, doesn't it? Thank you, and good night.

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