Angry no more

[MJontheMend]

In other words, in a close intimate relationship, then crying and being vulnerable makes sense. In a more stressed relationship like we have, pulling back a certain amount makes sense. How much you pull back is a guess. Not enough and you get hurt too much. Too much and you could send the marriage backwards.

I came across this quote in a novel I was reading recently and I thought it was somewhat relevant to this discussion.



"Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals: love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves"- Oliver Goldsmith

I think somebody on the BB once used the analogy that you need to pull back to a more distant orbit but not so far that you fly off into space. If you don't maintain equilibrium, if you try for a more intimate orbit than your spouse prefers then you will put yourself into the miserable role of the cold little planet orbiting the tyrant sun.

During one of my semi-recent, semi-drunken fights with my H, I said "You prefer a relationship at the level of Seinfeld and Elaine.". His reply was along the lines of "Face it. That is the type of relationship we have.". Now, if I weren't so darn differentiated I would have found a statement like that quite disheartening but the fact of the matter is my relationship with my H is currently at least a quantum level more intimate then Jerry and Elaine's and definitely better than it was a few years ago when I used to say to my H "You love me the way Mr. Brady loves Alice." and I really should have been saying "You love me the way a very unpleasant and cranky version of Mr. Brady would love Alice.".

A while back I read a novelette by Balzac about a young married couple who had managed to maintain intimacy and passion in their marriage. Balzac was trying to make the point of how rare this was. He described an interaction between a more typical couple of his time, I am paraphrasing "The husband turns to his wife in bed and asks 'Why don't you wear pretty caps to bed as you used to?' and the wife says 'Why do you not give me enough money to purchase such pretty caps?' and they both turn over and go to sleep.". I guess this came to mind when I think about your situation, Cobra, because of your wife's demand for money. It's interesting to consider how marriage used to be much more of a blatantly financial contract than it is these days. Girls had dowrys and concerns about virginity at marriage were very real concerns about inheritance rights based on paternity. I know I'm just rambling a bit off topic here but one thing that occurred to me during the sort of Alpha Male-effect of feminism on the modern marriage discussion we had recently on the BB was that when we talk about the real effects of feminism we can only rationally talk about economics. If you try to equate modern feminism with strong female personality traits then it's as though we are forgetting that Shakespeare wrote about Lady Macbeth and Kate the Shrew hundreds of years ago or that Atalanta would only marry the man who could beat her in a race more than a thousand years before that. Maybe your wife is like Atalanta and you just need some golden apples to distract her with so that you can win the race.