a thousand splinters

so anyway, it seems to me that the root of mrs zen's problem with me and mine with her is that we have different models of how relationships should be. it's not hard to find a reason for that, if you indulge in some junior psychology.

mrs zen's model is basically idealist and mine is pragmatic. that might be surprising, because leftist politics are often born out of idealism, and it's a cliche that as one becomes experienced, and learns to temper idealism, one's politics shift to the right, the natural home of the pragmatic. it's for another post to discuss why pragmatism is equally at home on the left, but i should say that i was an idealist as a kid, and i did grow out of it. i simply realised it was not the ideal world, and in this real one, principles serve us best as guideposts, not as rocks to smash ourselves to bits on.

mrs zen's parents were "everything to each other", which mrs zen says is what she thinks partners should be. i don't think either one would ever look outside their marriage for sex, for love or for anything much beyond "mateship", which is the Australian concept of having friends that do not care much for each other's complexities, but just enjoy having a beer together. mr zen-in-law has "mates", but he doesn't have any use for friends.

but the model hides a less shiny truth. mr zen-in-law does not need anyone besides mrs zen-in-law because he doesn't need anyone. he's a deeply selfish, self-centred man, whose life has always been all about him. he doesn't take anything from others, and that is mostly because he doesn't want to give them anything.

mrs zen-in-law is a planet revolving around mr zen-in-law, but does that make her happy? no! she has not found her "everything" in mr zen-in-law. she has settled for what she got. but he wanted to leave their hometown, where she had a life, then Brisbane, where she had another, to live on an island, and she was left lonely and bitter. he would not let her work. (how strange it is to think about a world in which we "let" our wives work! nowadays, we actively encourage it.) she reconciled herself but it does not seem to me that she will look back on a fulfilled life, or anything close.

so what is being "everything" in their case? does he share his hopes and fears with her? i think not, because he does not have hopes or fears, and never has. he devoted his life to securing an early retirement that he could spend fishing, and achieved what he wanted. i am not passing judgement on his ambition. there is nothing wrong with it. lives are for whatever you want them to be for. does he provide her with a conduit for expressing her feelings? god no. i have never seen them exchange more than a few words at a time. they are companionable with each other but no more than that. mrs zen-in-law is not either a warm person. she was not warm to mrs zen when she was a child, and it has taken mrs zen a long time -- and knowing me and my family -- to be able to become as warm as she is.

do you think that is a love i could provide, or live with? i wonder what sort of person could think that that was an ideal. it is so stunted. what a small world they create for each other. but maybe mrs zen wants her world to be small, comprehensible. i do understand that. what i don't understand is why she thought i would be the man to build a gilded cage for her.

and for kids too, how is that? when i ask mrs zen about how her dad was when she was a kid, she says, he was never around. he was always working. he worked two jobs to get his money to retire with. so he was never around for mrs zen-in-law either. my heart aches for the lonely woman, away from her family, her community, everything she knew, deserted by the man she had sacrificed all that for. and it aches too for mrs zen, who suffered in an abyss of coldness, unable to learn to want anything more than to be loved, but unable to conceive of love as something bigger than the paltry matiness that her dad showed her mum.

my parents have a different relationship. they've never thought they were "everything for each other". i think my mum wanted that, but she never fooled herself that my dad was anything like that. he has obvious flaws, and their marriage was rocky. but she is still with him, and her life is full and mostly happy. she took the pragmatic approach to him: she could leave him, be on her own, be spared his moods, but she saw the good in him. he is generous and kind sometimes, decent to her mostly. although as a kid she had thought she would want to know every part of her man, she soon realised that that wasn't necessary for a life together. he has a private life, things she's not interested in. i think she learned to accept that because he was a sailor, away for months at a time, and if she had worried over much about what he was up to, she would have torn herself apart, because she had no way to find out.

so my view of people is simple. i do not hold them up to ideals and fret about their failings. if i did, i would never have married mrs zen. what irony, that if i was the person she wants me to be, i would never have bothered with her in the first place. but i did, because i'm not. i believe that people have lots of facets. let's say we each have a thousand. and a person might be 600 good facets, 350 meh, 40 slightly annoying, and 10 bad. that's a pretty decent person i've just described, someone it's possible to love, because for most people, the meh would be double, and the good much much less.

i don't claim to be all good. not even close. and of course i know that what you find good and bad differs, depending on how you judge it, how you feel about it. but i don't understand why you would crush yourself in thinking all the time about the few, often very few bad things, when there is good to think about. imagine doing that to your kids (one of my greatest fears is that mrs zen will do precisely that to our kids: she already feels the normal moodiness of a primary schoolkid to be a drastically bad phase in Zenella's life, rather than the strugglings of a sensitive kid to express herself).

my mum accepted my dad, or her relationship with him at least, because although she could clearly see the bad, she could see what was good in it. it makes for a more positive view on life, at least.

but mrs zen is all, you keep secrets, you shouted at me when we were on holiday. and it's true, i do and i did. the former is never changing. i have always been private, closed-in, and i like it that way. i am not going to become open like her dad, because i feel i have more than him, and part of having more is giving more, but keeping more too. and yeah, i shouted at her. she needled me and i yelled. i'm not proud of it, but i'm not a sulker or a brooder. things irritate me and they build up, and i need the means to release the tension. because i can't communicate with mrs zen (she refuses, insisting on making every conversation into a litany of my faults and past transgressions), i am stuck with negative feelings. which boil over from time to time. if our relationship was better, it wouldn't happen. it does not help that i have a baseline of resentment, which makes it a lot easier to be angry. that is not her fault, and i don't blame her. but you cannot dispel it overnight.

things had been getting a lot better. we were at least managing to live together fairly well, even if we were not communicating. but that was the problem, because i cannot talk to her about things like, she will tell the kids that they are going to the same school as Zenella, which horrifies me, because she has said she is committed to go to England, but how can she be if she will not tell the kids? and all she will say is that oh, they've always talked about going to that school, and she doesn't want to unsettle them. well, okay, but they are going to be unsettled! and getting used to it is part of making the unsettling bearable. so why lie to them? of course, i'm led to think that she is not committed to going there at all. then i am talking to her about work, and how i hate editing so much. which i do. i badly need a change. and i'm very aware that being committed to my responsibilities makes change very difficult, because i can't afford ever to transition to something else, and i'm stuck with editing. that's tough to bear. so i say to her that i want to learn TESOL, which i always have, and she says yeah, do that. but i can't. what's the point? i could never actually use the qualification. she won't even consider going somewhere that i could. she takes the negative view: the kids' schooling, a foreign environment, and so on. so this is one of the bad things about her, and i can't talk to her about how frustrating it is, because the conversation will quickly sidetrack into what's bad about me. and i'm thinking, your ideal man would just say we're going, and you'd go. you do not appreciate that you are married to someone who thinks you should have choices.

so what can i do? i do not have any way to express frustration. i do not have friends here who i can talk to. i do not have any artistic outlet. i don't like to blog about it, because there are lots of good things about mrs zen, but it's the nature of writing, news if you like, that you focus on the things that are wrong, astray, not the smoothnesses. and of course that is what mrs zen does, tells herself the news all the time, focusing on the bad, ignoring the good, so that her view is out of balance. she doesn't see a person with a thousand facets; she just feels the hurt.

but i do. i couldn't carry on a relationship with her if i didn't fundamentally believe that the good outweighed the bad. it doesn't now, i'll admit that. but it can. not just for me, but for her, and my kids. i do not think it can be fixed though, because there is something wrong at base: although i know i have flaws, and feel that i should and can fix them, mrs zen does not. she feels resentful and angry, but is not aware of her own part in her resentfulness and anger. i'm all too aware of mine, which allows me to feel forgiving and able to move on. but for her, she is just a woman wronged, not one with an opportunity, because love, for her, is two people who make each other's world narrow, not two people who help each other make the world huge. and how can i change that?

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:15 am