Well, WAW is in the predictable mode since the Letitout Marathon, which was both predictable and expected -- which would, I suppose, be an oxymoron, since if something is predictable it more or less is by definition expected.
She's retreating, thinly communicative -- short e-mails with no pronouns, that sort of thing, but there's a hint, a whiff, a soupcon if you will, of a combination of irritation and intrigue. She hasn't come right out and asked, "Is there anyone else in the picture?" but she's obliquely referred to "what if" and "if ever" and the like, so I know the idea is lodged on a small piece of her brain.
As for me? Well dudes and dudettes it is blue skies and fields of clover for Smiley's Person. I had my own minor personal mini-breakthrough today while fighting my way home on Crappy 1960s Freeway after a NoHo lunch (shout-out to @aliveandkicking, yo!) with a Very Important Person (practically a legend in his own mind) in the world of international diplomacy.
It is becoming clearer and clearer to me as I listen to the ray-didio, puzzling and puzzling 'til my puzzler is sore, that I really, really lost myself -- to me -- in my marriage.
So many things, thoughts, preferences, wants were subordinate for the "good of the team." And I took what the Declaration of Independence calls "a long train of abuses and usurpations," accepting her evaluations, her characterizations, her grievances as being Gospel (if a Heathenic sort like me can borrow that helpful term). If I had the temerity to voice my evaluations and etc. I'd be accused of being "deliberately" contrary and contradictory -- as if I didn't actually have independent thoughts, but just tossed some one like costumes to piss her off.
And I thought about what is really a trivial, yet symbolically important, thing for me -- the physical manifestations of sentiment (or sentimentality). I have the first letter she ever wrote me. The first photograph ever taken of us. But years -- years, my friends -- without a birthday card, an anniversary card, a Valentine's Day card. Silly, stupid little things -- yet silly, stupid little things that I managed to procure every year. And when I did, from time-to-time, have a bit of Hallmark manna dropped into my lap, there'd be a kind of pro-forma invocation of affection ("you're such a great dad, the kids are lucky to have you, xoxo Mrs. SP") whereas mine had actual letters in them, actual thoughts put on paper through ball-point.
Why did I put up with it? Why did I take it? I remember the last office holiday party I attended. I sat, on her left, at a round table, around which were gathered 8 of her colleagues. And they spent the night talking about work, laughing at inside-jokes, funny things that had happened on the job -- you know, perfectly innocuous, stultifying, mind-numbingly dull mandatory fun. I sat there, literally for 3 hours, more-or-less silent, answering the infrequent question tossed me way but otherwise having nothing to say since I (a) don't know very much about their work and (b) wasn't a party to any of the "oh, do you remember?" hilarity that had clearly been ensuing all year long. And WAW did nothing -- nothing -- to bring me into the conversation. She was a full-fledged member of The Gang, hootin' and hollerin' with the rest of them, not 6 inches away from Mr. Cellophane.
But that's not her fault necessarily; I mean, I let it happen. I was complicit. I was a party to it. But what I realize is that, for whatever it's worth, I was in fact pretty dammed unsatisfied in my marriage -- and I'm not just talking about the mandatory annual sex ("can you hurry up?") -- but un-realized, un-actualized, un-, un-, un-personified.
But what I'd like to know, what I'm trying to get straight in my own mind, is why I did it -- what did I think it would do for me, get for me, accomplish for me? And why didn't she say anything? She knew who I was "before" -- why the passive acceptance of my self-subordination, self-abnegation, unless in some way it met her desires, preferences, goals?
Tough questions, none readily answerable "for real," but worth -- I believe -- reflecting upon because if -- IF -- I'm going to treat WAW like a prospect, I need to know that those decisions weren't in some sense a rational response to the general tone, the tenor if you will, the milieu of the marital partnership in question. Was that, in other words, who I became -- and thus, one might hypothesize, the zusammenbruch -- during the course of the M or, alternatively, was that who I was expected to be?
