Patience

A sonnet by G. M. Hopkins includes the line "Patience masks our ruins of wrecked past purpose." Patience watches, with bloodshot and tearful eyes, our unfulfilled desires. She protects us from despair but also deceives us with false hope. Patience invites loss and yet persists in obedience.

In the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul claims that "Love is patient … always perseveres ... never fails." On the contrary, I have to say that love has failed to sustain my marriage, that patience has simply masked the failure and that further perseverence is useless.

—Nat.

Naivete

A few days ago I mentioned Robert Bly’s book “Iron John”. It’s unlike any other book I have read, which makes it difficult me for to summarise or even categorise. Bly is part of a movement that seeks to re-establish a proper sense of manhood and in this book he approaches that goal mythologically.

There is much in that book I do not understand, but also a lot that strikes me as deeply insightful. One of the most relevant sections for me is about naïveté. I have never considered myself to be naïve, but in the sense Bly uses the word it describes me uncomfortably well. Not all that he says applies, but these extracts are both true and distressing (p. 63ff):

The naïve man feels a pride in being attacked. If his wife or girlfriend, furious, shouts that he is a “chauvinist,” a “sexist,” a “man,” he doesn’t fight back, but just takes it. He opens his shirt so that she can see more clearly where to put the lances. He ends with three or four javelins sticking out of his body, and blood running all over the floor.

He feels, as he absorbs attacks, that he is doing the brave and advanced thing; he will surely be able to recover somewhere in isolation. A woman, so mysterious and superior, has given him some attention. To be attacked by someone you love – what could be more wonderful?

The naïve man will also be proud that he can pick up the pain of others. He particularly picks up women’s pain. ... He is often more in touch with women’s pain than his own, and he will offer to carry a woman’s pain before he checks with his own heart to see if his labour is proper in the situation. I think each gender drops its own pain when it tries to carry the pain of the other gender. I don’t mean that men shouldn’t listen. But hearing a woman’s pain and carrying it are two different things.

We all have special relationships but [the naïve man] surrounds the special person with a cloying kind of goodwill. The relationship is so special that he never examines the dark side of the person. ... He accepts responses that are way off, conspires somehow with their dark side.

Sincerity is a big thing for him. He assumes that the person, stranger, or lover he talks with is straightforward, goodwilled, and speaking from the heart. ... He puts a lot of stock in his own sincerity. He believes in it, as if it were a horse or a walled city. He assumes that it will, and should, protect him from consequences that fall to less open people.

A naïve man acts out strange plays of self-isolation. For example, when an angry woman is criticizing him, he may say, quite sensibly, “You’re right, I had no right to do that.”

The naïve man will lose what is most precious to him because of lack of boundaries. ... He confides the contents of last night’s dream to a total stranger. ... He rarely fights for what is his; he gives away his eggs and other people raise his chicks. We could say that, unaware of boundaries, he does not develop a good container for his soul, nor a good container for two people. There’s a leak in it somewhere.

The naïve man often doesn’t know that there is a being in him that wants to remain sick. Inside each man and woman there is a sick person and a well person; and one needs to know which one is talking at any moment. But awareness of the sick being, and knowledge of how strong he is, is not part of the naïve man’s field of perceptions.

The naïve man often lacks what James Hillman has called “natural brutality.” The mother hawk pushes the fledglings out of the nest one day; we notice the father fox drives the cubs away in early October. But the ascender lets things go on too long. At the start of a relationship, a few harsh words of truth would have been helpful. Instead he waits and waits, and then a major wounding happens farther down the line.

His timing is off. We notice that there will often be a missing beat a second or so after he takes a blow, verbal or physical. He will go directly from the pain of receiving a blow to an empathetic grasp of the reason why it came, skipping over the anger entirely. Misusing Jesus’ remark, he turns the missing cheek.

As a final remark about naïveté, we might mention that there is something in naïveté that demands betrayal. ... When a woman lives with a truly naïve man for a while, she feels impersonally impelled to betray him.

—Nat

You shall have no other gods before me

This post is way out of time sequence: it’s based on stuff I thought about months ago, but seems more relevant now in the light of my complaints against God. I claimed to have given God my complete allegiance, but to be honest, I have allowed H to displace God. That’s a type of idolatry and has damaging consequences for both her and myself.

When there has been a conflict (perceived or real) between what H wants of me and what God wants of me, I have often chosen H. I have set aside what I took to be a clear call from God to peacemaking in xxx. I set aside my commitment to live simply. I gave God less of my time and money. I stopped putting into practice my understanding of ecclesiology.

In part, I was conscious of the conflict and believed that I was doing the right thing by making our marriage a #1 priority. Over time I just fell into a habit of putting H first. Had I made the opposite decisions, as though my relationship with H was not itself a godly pursuit, would things have turned out any better? How is that balancing act supposed to work? Would God call someone into marriage and then call them towards something incompatible with that marriage? I thought not, and chose to comply with H. Now H is seeing a similar incompatibility and choosing God. Perhaps she is making the more holy choice. But if that is the case, then God is a mean bastard.

My idolatry is shown not only in those compromises, but also, perhaps more significantly, in my expectation that I would find satisfaction/joy/happiness in H rather than God. I have treasured her above all else – and believed that I was doing the right thing. Sadly, rather than making H feel good, those attitudes of mine have made her feel smothered and inadequate.

Sin always has its consequences, and the wages demanded in this case seem to be the death of my marriage.

A friend suggested that the issue may be my elevation of the concept of marriage rather than my elevation of H. That was the case for Sheldon Vanauken, who describes the idealisation of romantic love in his auto-biographical “A Severe Mercy”. He and his wife had the “perfect” marriage that was cut short by her untimely death to cancer. In a letter to Vanauken, C. S. Lewis described the death as a severe mercy, suggesting that if the idol of their marriage had been left unchallenged, the spiritual consequences for both husband and wife might have been something worse. I don’t think that applies to my view on marriage, though certainly may apply to my attitude to H.

I can see how making an idol of H has made me less happy. I have become naïve in the sense that Robert Bly uses in “Iron John” (that’s such an accurate description of me I shall leave the details until the next post). This idolatry has also made me lose track of what I enjoy. I have held as a principle “Glorify God and do what you want”, but the second phrase only works in the light of the first. Having displaced God, I have undermined the ability to seek what I want.

There have been consequences for H as well. To the extent that I thought my happiness depended on her and treated her as an object of worship, I have created an image that she could never live up to. I don’t mean that I have idealised her and then felt let down by the reality of her faults; I mean that placing her at the centre of my life has imposed an unholy burden of responsibility on her. She has felt unworthy in that position but unable (until now) to escape the burden. She says she felt smothered by my affection and judged by my goodness.

One thing that is clear to me is that I must make sure not to fill the hole left by H with anything other than God. I am purposefully keeping myself busy so that I don’t cycle into depression or isolation. But what I must avoid is seeking meaning or happiness in those things, or worse, in other people.

—Nat

The reason for sexual purity

A good friend has suggested that I think more about the nature of my commitment to sexual purity. Was it a commitment to my wife, for the pragmatic reason that relationships works out better on that basis? Or was it a commitment to God, for some higher, more principled reason?

Seems to me, as is clear in this other post, that I have held to the former idea. And consequently, now that my marriage has failed, the commitment to sexual purity seems pointless. But my friend’s question deserves further thought and prayer. How does my allegiance to Christ inform the expression of my natural sexual desires? What’s the spiritual purpose of abstinence?

I do not believe that God’s instructions to us on holy living are arbitrary or designed to frustrate us. And yet I don’t know if I can continue to cope without sex. My attempts to kerb my physical sexual urges have not been successful over the last year and I do not see how it is possible to continue for another year. It brings no joy and seems meaningless. How can this be God’s intent? And where is the "way of escape" promised in 1 Corinthians 10:13?

For several weeks I have been seriously investigating the option of turning to an “escort” and imagining how it would play out. What would it achieve? At what risk? Several people have advised me that this is a time when I should be looking after my own interests and caring for myself: I think they’d be surprised to know the direction of my thinking in that regard!

Today, that option seems less attractive than it was. Although it seems like fun, it does not yet seem right. So that plan is on hold -- for now. But something must change. Abstinence is killing me.

Hate is not a normal part of my vocabulary, but I absolutely hate this situation I am in. And I am angry that H has forced me into a position where I am considering such as option. I hate the waste of time and energy I am spending to mutilate a part of me that should have been a source of joy and blessing.


In this and other matters I am really lost. I don’t know where I am or where I am heading, and I have lost track of where North is. I am carried along by the momentum of my past discipline, but without my past confidence or peace.

—Nat

One is the loneliest number...

For a change, I'm not going to write about how lonely and painful losing my wife is. Instead, I want to repeat my invitation to become part of this blog. It's getting lonely being the only author here.

As I've written before, the intention of this blog has never been for me to be the sole contributor. I write with the hope that I can voice my own grief, for sure. I also hope that my words might express the grief of being left by a wife, on behalf of countless other men. But my greatest hope for this blog is that it becomes a place where men struggling through this horrible time in their lives could do so in solidarity with each other.

Would you like to share your own story, or observations on mine? Are there other people you know who might like to join in?

—Nat