First Try

This isn't going to make a lot of sense at first, because I'm not really clear what I am thinking. Aren't blogs wonderful that way?

I am beginning to formulate answers to the questions that I have been asking for thirty some years. This attempt begins this way:

On Tuesday, when I return to work, I will see a gentleman for the second time. I have seen him once when he came in at the behest of his wife. She told him he needed help badly, and she could no longer endure being around him. She told him that over two years ago. Two weeks ago, when the divorce papers arrived, he called my office.

When he came in he told me that he had been married over twenty years, and he knew he wasn't perfect. But he didn't drink, he wasn't physically abusive, and he was a hard worker. He thought that if his wife threw this marriage away she was just being stupid and wasting a lot of money. Also, things would be a lot better if they began having sex again. She had cut him off soon after she told him he was hopelessly nuts, and by doing that she was only making things worse.

His wife came in the next week and described a twenty year marriage to the typical "bad husband." Yes he worked hard and gave the family some money but he spent more on boats, trucks and quads than on his kids. His indulgences have only led to one bankruptcy.

It seems that his child raising philosophy was to scream and swear at the four of them, especially if they were in a Little League game and missed a pitch, or if he was watching TV and they were talking in the other room, or if his daughter was talking to a boy.

Besides sex, she feels the major reason he has a wife is to blame her for everything that has gone wrong in his life. That includes the jobs he has lost, or promotions he missed, or family fights, or his mother's illness.

OK, you have the picture. I have seen hundred of similar couples. That's what I want to talk about. These couples, married, unmarried, straight, gay, white, black, Muslim, born-again, Jewish, Catholic, even Yankee fans, go through this. They battle for years and stay together. Maybe not forever, but usually for twenty, thirty or even forty years.

There is something to this that is more than just financial worries, concerns about the kids, low self-esteem, issues with fathers or mothers, or other losses in childhood. Those are bogus rationalizations the mind makes up to stay in hell for another day, week, month and then years.

I think there is something in our evolutionary make-up that makes our brains want to hold these relationships together, especially once they have become emotionally and sexually intimate.

I've been reading about attachment theory, mirror neurons, the levels and formation of consciousness, and interpersonal psychology, among other things ( I read a lot when I'm not getting in shape for the up-coming softball season -- but more on that later).

Something happens in brains that doesn't let go. I don't know what it is; I really have no direct way of finding out so it is all bullshit science, like the kind you get on Oprah. But I do have years and years of anecdotal evidence, like the above mentioned couple. It certainly isn't anything rational, we know that. It happens to people who seem intelligent and competent, and it happens to fools.

Yes, I know people do get divorced, and do part, that's why we have country and western songs, but it is never easy, and never without deep psychic scars. These losses hurt deeply and have long lasting psychological effects.

I will work on making sense out of this in the coming days.

Thanks for listening.