Perhaps the final one

My lack of recent posting is mostly due to lack of time. But I think this blog has come to an end. My hope that other people would post their experience and insights hasn't come about. I'm dissappointed about that, but nevertheless I hope that something I have written will help someone.

My story isn't over of course, and perhaps it is unfair to end with the negativity of the last entry. Over the past few months I have moved from grief to confusion -- though perhaps confusion is just another stage of grief. I no longer feel so weighed down or tearful or angry. But what dominates my thoughts now is doubt and worry. As I wrote earlier, "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 have lost the clarity I used to have about who I am. I worry about my children.

It's unlikely that I'll post any more here, though I'll keep the site active and will read any comments you make. I welcome any email, which you can send to the address you'll find somewhere else on this site.

—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

"As you wish" doesn't work

In my relationship with H, an early commitment was to be her servant. But my intention was never for that to be one-sided. I did not want a relationship where she felt indebted, nor one where I was trampled on. In my mind this was clear from the first, traumatic year of  our marriage: I would serve H in the hope that when she felt loved and secure she would also serve me. (Is there any difference between mutual servanthood and mutual love?) But instead, she has experienced my service as oppressive – perhaps as a debt she cannot repay – and built a wall of protection around herself, founded on a mistrust of my best intentions, that prevented any mutuality at all.

I’ve always called it servanthood, but as she rejects that core element of my self-image, my self confidence is shattered. Is it just she who has misunderstood, or do others share the same perception that I am arrogant and judgemental? Have I built my life on a bad idea?

Perhaps generosity is a more helpful image of essentially the same desire. I love being generous: generous with my money, with my time, and in the way I interpret other’s motives. I love the giving of myself to others, and never more than to H.

The whole of our marriage has been made hollow by a lack of intimacy, which makes me wonder what it is that I have lost by now being separated. It’s not as though past intimacy has suddenly been taken away. What’s different now? Even though H didn’t allow herself to be intimate with me, I embedded myself in a sort of one-way intimacy. Always generous to her. Always hoping she would one day see and appreciate it: like Wesley’s repeated “As you wish”. Always serving in the hope that she would one day reciprocate. But my Buttercup never came to that life-changing moment when her eyes opened to the realisation of what mutual love could mean.

What’s different is not any change in what I can expect from H, but that I can no longer express my generosity, my intimacy, with her.

No, that’s rubbish; unhelpful rationalisation. What’s different is that I can no longer feel her warmth next to me in bed, can no longer feel her softness under my hand, no longer exchange a kiss, a cuddle. No longer delude myself that she wishes those things from me.

I knew that she was taking advantage of my generosity, though I mostly chose not to know it. She would never engage in a discussion of it and I drifted in a quicksand of optimism, dreaming that one day she would understand. I should have listened to a counsellor who, very early in our marriage, warned that servanthood [I assume he meant servanthood that is not mutual] is not a good basis for a relationship.

— Nat

I must be a complete idiot

H. says that her friends think I am amazing in the way I have given her the freedom she needs and patiently coped with her. But what sort of crazy man continues to live with the woman who has broken his heart?

Putting aside my wish that it could be so, there is no reason to think that she will treat me any differently in the future. No reason to think that she will want intimacy with me. No reason for her to suddenly become more sexually expressive. No reason she will not continue to see me as a threat and need to protect herself against me. No reason to think that she will become interested in me qua me.
So why do I persist?

Well it is almost certainly the best situation for our wonderful children. This isn’t an explosive conflict situation and they aren’t seeing us at each other’s throats. So being able to avoid the logistical and emotional nightmare of shuffling them between two houses has been very good. Neither of us want to hurt them and the practical challenges of any alternative are a bit daunting. If I lived elsewhere and we took turns looking after the kids, how could I maintain a full-time job and still do all the transporting etc that they need? (How does any single parent manage?)

I understand that although my situation, like everyone's, is unique, it is certainly no more difficult or tragic than the hardships faced by millions of others. I am still well off in terms of money and caring friends and family and health, with all the unfair advantages of being born a white, English-speaking male. But it continues to hurt almost beyond bearing. And I must be a complete idiot to continue trying to bear it.

— Nat.