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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
Dear Cary,
I am two years into a relationship with -- you guessed it -- a wonderful man. He shares most of my interests, is sincere and kind, is strongly committed to his principles, treats his mother well and likes dogs and children. We have both been married and divorced, and although my marriage lasted much longer, he seems to have deeper scars from his. He has had many relationships, most ending before two years, while I have had very few. He lives in another city, about an hour from mine, so we usually see each other Saturday night through Sunday afternoon. He has a demanding and time-consuming job, is a published writer and a speaker at just about anyplace that asks him, and is always ready to help out a friend or acquaintance or cause. This leaves little time for a relationship and he is always exhausted.
I think that we are destined to end up as his other relationships have gone -- as former lovers and now friends. I do not want another marriage, but it seems odd to me that we have yet to get beyond the "I like you" stage. I need private time as much as the next person, but at some point I would like to spend more than 20 hours a week with someone, and preferably not watching them taking a nap.
The work he does is important and he is passionate about it. I would never want him to give it up even if he could. His idea of living together or being married would be to buy homes next to each other so each person has his and her own space. I think this would make it very easy to hide from the responsibilities of a relationship. What do you think?
I think he has a full life that doesn't really require a partner, just a friend to hang out with during a lull. He's a very sweet man, attentive and fun to be with, but (what is the phrase?) emotionally unavailable? Overscheduled? His female friends have warned him that I "won't put up with this weekend thing" for long and we have talked around some of these points, but we never seriously discuss anything as there is never enough time.
Should I just enjoy the companionship and stop analyzing everything? Or start looking for a simple man who isn't saving the world, but who has more time for me? Am I selfish, stupid or just mixed-up?
Dear Selfish,
This is an interesting and compelling question that is difficult for me, as a man, to answer. But I will try, mainly by confessing to you some things about myself. Like this man, I am temperamentally independent, obsessed with my work, jealous of my time and often "emotionally unavailable." In a sense, and I think many men would agree with me, this man has achieved the Holy Grail of manhood: He does his work, keeps his own hours, lives in his own place and keeps his relationships with women on his own terms.
But I describe the virtues of his position somewhat cynically, because the greatest gifts I have received in my marriage were not the gifts I thought I wanted but the ones that were, in a sense, forced upon me. How do I mean that? Well, as I say, I would love to be the cowboy and, in fact, I thought I would remain the cowboy even if I got married. I would just be a cowboy who happens to have a wife.
But it turned out that my wife did not really want a cowboy who happened to be married; what she actually had in mind was having a husband. This was of course a shock to the cowboy, who believed the range still needed riding and the fences needed tending regardless of what changes had occurred in the cowboy's marital status. But as he rode the range and tended the fences he began to realize that he was doing it not out of ambition or love but out of a kind of arid desperation, that the clear starry sky looked good because it was a palliative for some emptiness bigger than the sky itself. He was not as self-sufficient as he thought.
The difference between me and my wife is that when she misses me she can tell me in so many words. But when I miss her I think maybe the range requires some riding or the fences are deteriorating and I'd better saddle up to check on them and the night sky looks like a martini looks to a drunk and so my impulse is to ride out into the desert and it takes me days to realize that I don't really want to ride out into the desert but that's just what I'm used to doing when I'm lonely, because I cloak my feelings in ideas and suppress them with assumptions out of long and steady habit, and only when I realize I am trembling, I am angry, I am hungry and scared and empty and lost do I then conclude with a slap at my forehead: Buddy, you miss your wife, yes you do but you don't hardly even know it.
So as I said, it's difficult for me, as a man, to suggest what to do, because I empathize so acutely with who he is. You know the joke about how many psychotherapists it takes to change a light bulb? Just one, but the light bulb has to want to change. This guy may not want to change, and if he doesn't, it would be nothing but heartache for you to persist. Some men will always prefer the arid authority of their work to the rich vulnerability of a shared life. For them it is simpler and cleaner, if also thinner and poorer, to stick with what they know.
