The Art of Conversation

I love getting mail about my blog. The responses I get are generally thought provoking, ofttimes touching and always inflate my ego. It's comforting to know there are other people out there.

And every once in a while I delude myself into thinking I may have helped someone else in a similar position.

This week I got a doozy. Johnny-Boy is my most articulate friend. But if you're familiar with my friends, that's no great compliment. I know I retired this blog earlier this week, but that was before I decided to publicly deconstruct a touching, personal, emotional letter from a friend for few cheap laughs.

And this is why I only have 60 Facebook friends...

Johnny-Boy is in purple, your humble scribe will be playing for the blue team.

***

Hey Bob,

Very interesting blog post.  I figured it would be better to reply privately rather than post a response visible to the world.

Too bad you didn't realize I'd post this anyway.

The unfortunate fact is, you'll never completely know why she decided to leave.  Frankly, she may not really know why she left either. Even if she told you right this minute why she left:

(a) you probably wouldn't believe her;
(b) she might not know the true reasons herself.

You are preaching to the choir brother. After thinking it over, I completely agree on both points.

You can drive yourself crazy speculating why she left, and it's not going to give you one bit of relief or peace.  At least it didn't for me.

This is about me John. Always remember that. I'm not your f'n therapist.

Even if you did know, would it make you feel any better?  Would it be preferable to hear that she left you because [fill in the character flaw or perceived shortcoming here]?

Truthfully, probably not. I would probably be crushed if she picked one of my obvious character flaws. I think I've convinced myself that I could somehow "fix" my mistakes in my next relationship, but the fact is that it's unlikely I'd be able to affect any real change anyway. And I'm not convinced I'd necessarily think of her criticisms as 'flaws'. I expect some of the characteristics she disliked are simply part of me.

Woody Allen said it best -- "The heart wants what the heart wants".  i.e., what we long for often cannot be explained or described rationally, but we simply "know" what we want, and it's difficult to swim upstream in that river.  (Granted, Woody said it in the context of banging his adopted daughter, but the idea still holds.)  I suspect that's what happened with your ex.  It's not something that you could have changed or done differently.

That was laugh out loud funny. And touching. "The heart wants what the heart wants." As a closeted romantic, the thought is very appealing to me.

I know, this is all hard to hear for an engineer type who applies the scientific method to everything.  But you really couldn't have done anything differently -- and even if you could, it would have required changing yourself in a way that would have made you somebody other than who you are.  It's not as though you made some "mistake" that you could have "fixed" or that you can "fix" the next time around.  Unfortunately, sometimes just being yourself isn't enough.

"Unfortunately sometimes just being yourself isn't enough." That hurt. But you are right, the changes that would have been required probably would have forced me to give up being "me". I'd never considered that before and I must admit to being shocked by the thought.

I also had the feelings of "everything is gone for good".  Yeah, in the sense of you and your ex and the kids as one family, those days are past tense.  But there's a lot more to life than just being married.  You still have your kids.  You'll still be able to have a lot of great times with them, and to be a good parent to them.  You still have your friends (and have probably gained a few new ones in the process).

I have gained many, many new friends. You know who you are. Not enough to get over 60, but a lot.

You still have your job, and your home, and money in the bank (maybe not as much as before, but you're not going to have to give blow jobs for rent money).

Like anyone would pay me for a blowjob... Try raising venture capital with that business plan.

It's cliche, but you have your health.  Maybe some of the good things are gone for good, but other good things will sprout to take their place.  You don't have to deny your ex's place in any of those memories, or make them any less good because she's in them.

Very true.

The last point I'll mention is that you're not exactly right (I was going to say "you're wrong", but that sounds nicer, don't you think?) when you say that it's only going to get worse. 

I'm never wrong. But I'll concede "not exactly right."

Yeah, the trial won't be fun.  It'll probably (I say "probably" because I never had to go through a contested divorce trial) feel like getting reamed up the ass with an umbrella.

You've never experienced a contested divorce, but you have been reamed by an umbrella? Kinky. At least I know what you West Side Singles do on the weekends.

But in a lot of ways, it will be anti-climactic.  Emotionally, the worst is over.  You've been split for almost a year now, and had almost a year to adjust to the new reality.  No, you're not completely over the experience yet, but you're a lot farther along now than you were last summer.  There aren't any more major surprises in store.  It's hard to see because it is not a type of progress that can be measured, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.  It's like one of those Zen / Buddhist things that Meixner used to talk about in AP English -- you'll know that you are ready to begin healing when you are done.

A Ms. Meixner reference? That's a low blow John. Are you trying to get me to cry? It's not going to work.

Life experiences are not like mountain peaks where you can see which ones are the tallest.  Knowing which part of the process was the worst is something you can determine only when looking back, never ahead.

You just jumped the poetic shark. But I know what you mean.

I lied and am going to make one other comment.  You mentioned the weather.  Don't be surprised if that really is a factor (I'm sure you've heard the term Seasonal Affect Disorder, or SAD).  Face it, we live in a region of the country that has weather that sucks hind tit from December through March.

At least you're not Detroit!

Unless you are truly strapped for every penny in your post-divorce budget, I'd suggest setting aside a few bucks throughout the year and taking a vacation somewhere around next February.

That is a great suggestion!

Four to five days of sunny and warm weather will reset the clock on the SAD-o-meter and make the craptastic winter more tolerable.  (This is "do as I say, not as I do" advice, as I haven't taken a winter vacation since I got divorced; I was going to do something this winter, but then started dating somebody regularly, which has its own positive effects.)  Pick a place like Puerto Rico or southern Florida or somewhere else that will be 70+ and sunny when it is snowing back home, and go enjoy yourself for a few days.

Congratulations on finding a squeeze. Not to be obvious, but unless she's wanted by the po-po she'd probably like to go to someplace warm too.

Assuming you and your ass-brella can get through the Homeland Security metal detectors.

Hang in there and good luck at the trial.

With friends like you it's a shoe-in.

Thanks.

Melancholy Flowers

There are a lot of great songs about memories. Just off the top of my head..

Weezer, Panic! At The Disco, David Guetta and of course, Cats.

Sometimes I feel like this whole divorce is a bad dream that I am trapped in and I just can't wake up.

I find this to be really odd. I can still clearly remember my life prior to June 22nd. I remember the family trip we took to Washington D.C. in April. I remember how much fun we all had together and what a great experience it was for me, my wife and our kids seeing the various museums and monuments.

I have the pictures to prove it.

I remember having dinner at the top of the Holiday Inn overlooking Georgetown. I remember the picnic on the banks of the Potomac with my mother and my half-sisters. I remember how much fun my son had riding the Metro through the city. I remember Cordie smiling in the morning sunshine.

I remember going fishing on Lake Ontario and the excitement of the kids. I remember stopping in Picton for ice cream. I remember Cordie catching perch and playing in the boat. I remember swimming at the beach.

I remember Christmas morning opening gifts and our Christmas dinner. I remember decorating the tree and putting the lights on the house. I remember shopping for my wife and wrapping her presents while hoping that this year I finally got it right.

And then I remember that it's all gone. No more Christmas mornings together as a family. No more family vacations. No more laughter, no more hugs, no more photos. Everything that made life worth living is gone for good.

I still have no idea why my wife felt she needed to leave. I wonder if she really understood the impact of that decision on our children, on me, on herself? Did she realize the true cost of her "vacation" when she made that decision? If she didn't, would she do it again?

I feel like I'm going to wake up and everything will be back to normal and my wife will love me again. I feel like this is all a big mistake.

And then I feel pretty damn stupid for feeling this way.

"We have it all, yet we have nothing" - Megamind

I know it's not exactly Shakespeare, but it fits my mood. I find myself very mel-on-kaly of late. I'm depressed over the lack of resolution on my divorce, the length of the Michigan winter and the affect all of this is having on my kids. It's tough. This is easily the hardest thing I've ever had to go through. It's much worse than eighth grade, my senior year or the death of my father. Sometimes it seems like everything good has been sucked out of the world.

And it's only going to get worse.

My trial starts in four weeks. We failed to reach an amicable settlement. It's going to get very, very ugly very, very soon.

I desperately want to blame myself for this. I want to know what I did wrong so I can force myself to feel like I deserve this. If it made sense perhaps I could forgive myself. But not knowing is my curse. The Ex doesn't realize it, but the fact that I will never know why she left is the worst thing she could do to me. The hurtful words, the greed, the false accusations - those roll off. But the 'not knowing' drives me insane. It eats at me every day to not know where it went wrong. To not know what brought this ugliness about. To not know why she felt the need to throw away everything we built together over 16 years. To not know why she needed to damage our children in this way. To not understand why she chose someone else over me.

I'll never know.

I think my divorce may have to do with the power dynamic in our relationship. The Ex was always the dominant member of our partnership. I was the submissive. It was this way from the very beginning. I never realized this during our marriage - it's only become apparent after the fact.

I can't say this for sure, but I think the cognitive dissonance between her need to be dominant and her economic subservience to me may have been the root cause of her unhappiness and the reason our marriage imploded.

I know she was very unhappy with her career. I think my (relative) success ate at her. I think she was very, very uncomfortable being dependent upon me financially. As long as I was submissive to her, we made it work. But when I demanded an end to her inappropriate emotional relationship it all boiled to a head. I wasn't just financially dominating her, I was now trying to control her emotionally, and that was too much. I think I've written before how I can't remember ever saying "no" to any request from her. This might have been the peanut butter that kept our marriage sandwich together.

In this light, her need to hurt and destroy me is understandable. It's dominance behavior. She wants desperately to regain control over me, and she's going to do it financially through the courts. She's trying to turn my own "weapon" against me. She's breaking free of my control. It's not greed driving her behavior - it's her need to see me broken. To see me crawl. To make me kneel before Zod. Perhaps even to free herself.

Funny aside, Zod never actually says this to Superman - he addresses that line to the American President.

Unfortunately, I've been responding to her every attack by becoming more resistant, more angry, more dominant, more controlling. This escalates the tension and animosity even further and raises the stakes of our dangerous game. Somehow we need to get this train off the current tracks before we go off the cliff.

If you think about it, my desperate need to blame myself for this is more evidence of my need to be submissive. It's certainly consistent with my taste for strong, assertive women.

Perhaps all relationships are about control. Perhaps everything comes down to a simple battle for dominance. Maybe my psychological analysis of the situation is total claptrap.

Maybe I won't have to do this again if I can figure out what I truly did wrong this time. Maybe this is a good place to end this blog.


A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser. - William Shakespeare