The Vine: July 3, 2002
Sars, I love your advice, and while I think you were essentially correct with No Clever, there’s a lot between the lines in her letter. And I have to disagree that it’s not about fairness. Sorry, but it is.
It seems pretty clear to me, having had the dubious benefit of the experience, that No Clever’s boyfriend is pressuring her into a three-way. When a woman says, “I like the idea,” there’s a hidden emphasis there: “I like the IDEA.” When a gal is genuinely turned on by something, she doesn’t say she likes the idea, she says, “I can’t stop thinking about it” or whatever. Another clue is in the way she says, “I have resolved any issues.” That’s code for “I was freaked out by the idea at first, but I’m trying to fight my feelings for his sake.”
She’s correct to be worried about fairness. She’s been conscientiously trying her hardest to be accommodating, but he’s not interested in parity, just the fantasy he wants. Her subconscious has figured this out, and that’s what her letter screams out to me.
No Clever, don’t be accommodating! Don’t resolve your issues. Stand up for yourself.
Been There, And Wasted Years Before Standing Up
Dear Been There,
“Sorry,” but it still isn’t about fairness. No Clever’s boyfriend isn’t interested in sleeping with another man, and that has nothing to do with “parity.” He just isn’t interested. And there’s nothing wrong or unjust, to my mind, about his having a three-way-with-two-chicks fantasy and wanting to act on it, as long as he’s not pressuring No Clever to go through with it — which she made a point of saying that he isn’t doing.
You make generalizations about the way “gals” think about these things that I don’t think hold up, you ascribe a sleaziness to No Clever’s boyfriend that there’s no evidence of in the original letter…your reaction isn’t about No Clever. It’s about you. Maybe it’s an accurate take and maybe it’s not, but it’s definitely projection.
No Clever’s boyfriend agreed not to go through with it if No Clever didn’t feel comfortable. He’s met his burden of fairness here.
Dear Sars,
My husband and I have been married for six years. Except for one issue, we have a great marriage. What’s the one issue? Reproduction. In a nutshell, I want to have a baby; he doesn’t.
You might ask if I was aware of his feelings when we got married. Well, yes. Except back then, he said he wanted kids. Somewhere along the line, he changed his mind. To add to this, I was one of the small percentage of women to get pregnant while on the pill (yes, it can happen) about two years ago. He took the news of my pregnancy very badly at first, threatening to leave. But after a few weeks, he seemed to accept things and said he’d stay with me and try to do his best as a father, which is all I could ever ask anyway. Unfortunately, my pregnancy ended in a miscarriage after two and a half months.
I’ve dealt with that loss, but the idea of having a baby is in my thoughts a lot lately. I’m 32 years old and feel that the next couple of years would be ideal to start our family. I have a great and flexible job and am mentally and emotionally ready to take on the challenge of motherhood.
I’m afraid to bring this up to my husband because I’m pretty darn sure he still doesn’t want to have kids. I have some suspicions about why he feels this way — he had an abusive childhood at the hands of his father. Obviously, he would have some issues in that area. He also recently went through a year of unemployment, so is probably very nervous about the financial responsibility involved in raising a child. But he’s got a great job now and we’re really good with our money, so this shouldn’t be an obstacle.
Basically, I feel like all my options suck. I can “accidentally” get pregnant (an idea which I find morally abhorrent), try to give up my desire for a child (not likely to happen), or get divorced (but then what if I never meet anyone else with whom I want to have a child — I’m not super-psyched about the idea of being a single mom). I don’t want to trick him into being a father — I want this to be a decision that we make mutually since it will change our lives forever.
Anyway, I’d love to hear your take on my situation. Thanks for your time and consideration — I really appreciate it.
Would-be Mommy
Dear Mommy,
I’m sorry for your loss.
It’s really scary, because you don’t want to hear what you think he’ll say, but you have to talk to your husband about this — honestly, thoroughly, and soon.
Before you bring it up, though, do some serious thinking about what you want out of the discussion — realistic thinking. You say you want to make the decision mutually, but you should prepare yourself for the very real possibility that that won’t happen. Your husband’s feelings on the subject seem pretty clear to me. Sure, he might change his mind if you make it a deal-breaker…but do you want to enter into parenthood knowing that you had to talk your partner into it? Do you want that hanging over your head? Do you want to talk him into giving kids a try and then wait for the other shoe to drop for the rest of your married life? Do you want to find out later that he’s not the fathering type, and by “find out” I mean “come home and find him gone,” six months into the pregnancy, or when the baby’s a year old, or five, or fifteen? Do you want to hear “hey, you wanted a kid — you deal with it” every time the kid has a full diaper or needs a ride to soccer practice?
The last time you got pregnant, he threatened to leave you. That’s the whole story, from where I sit. He considered bailing on you, the woman he claims to love, and then he said he’d “try to do his best,” like, gosh, that’s big of him. That’s the father you want for your child? I don’t think so.
Talk to him about it calmly, get everything out on the table, and see how it goes — but recognize ahead of time that you probably won’t reach a happy consensus, and that the issue will eventually poison the well of your marriage if it remains unresolved. Decide whether it’s more important to you to have a child or to stay married to this guy — because based on what you’ve told me, I would not advise doing both.
The fact that you fear even bringing it up speaks volumes. Get an answer. If it’s not one you can live with, leave him. If the two of you can’t see eye-to-eye on this particular issue, there’s nothing else you can do.
Sars —
I have a good friend. We’ve been close for several years now, despite lots of ups and downs for both of us. I suffer from depression, she suffers from a mental illness as well, and for a long time, that has made us sympathetic and close. When I say “ups and downs,” I mean that we’ve stayed friends through her visits to the mental hospital, through major disagreements over politics, even through a period of time where she went to a religious recovery center, stopped communicating with me for a while, and wrote me a sort of breaking-off-all-contact-with-the-outside-world-now letter. She got out. I was mad. She was sorry, and explained how desperate she was to believe that if she just did everything the religious recovery people told her to do, she’d get completely well. I was sorry for being mad. We got over it.
But now I feel like things are changing for us. She’s seeing a counselor and she feels really strongly that I need to do that also, and although I’ve explained the reasons I’m not quite ready to do that, she keeps bringing it up. She said recently that she can tell I’m “down” (though I feel like I’m on a fairly even keel) because (she says) I talk about it a lot in our conversations — but I feel like our conversations, far from being an even exchange, are mostly encounters where she tells me everything that happened to her that day, and I listen. Sometimes I interject some things, just to keep from saying “uh huh” for a straight hour; because she’s in school and I’m working at a job a monkey could do, I tend to interject whatever I’m thinking about rather than something I’m doing.
She’s also going to get on antidepressants because she’s becoming more and more depressed. She told me that today, in the middle of a “serious talk” we had to have right away (I put my evening plans on hold and threw my just-cooked dinner in the fridge to meet her for this). The serious talk consisted of her wish to get off her chest that she has the following “issues” with me: One, that I think she’s not as smart as I am (her assertion, NOT my actual belief) — the evidence for this being some teasing about things like wrong gameshow answers and funny grammatical mistakes, which was, I thought, a mutual pastime, and also, my willingness to argue tirelessly and passionately on subjects we don’t agree on (she feels I’m not hearing her, and I thought we were just, you know, being philosophical and shit). Two, that I don’t take her mental illness seriously enough, because when she admits to engaging in an behavior relating to her illness (which is seldom — until tonight, I’d thought she was very nearly totally recovered), I’d ask if I could do anything (of course I can’t) to help, and when the inevitable “no” came, I’d try to be like, “Look, it’s okay. Maybe you’ll have a better day tomorrow.” Three, as I said, she’s “worried about me” because I seem depressed to her.
I’m not saying I’m a perfect friend, here. She’s asked me to handle her comments about her mental illness differently — say different things that she finds more supportive — and I’m totally willing to comply. I’m glad to. But part of me is thinking…these conversations, these issues, this is stuff that’s been going on for a long time. And Friend is pretty up-front, usually, about what bugs her. Her complaints seem to be that I didn’t know her mental illness was more serious (she didn’t tell me), I joke with her (in what I thought was a benign and mutual way) about things like mispronunciations of words, and I’m telling her about my problems on the phone. I’m wondering if this is more her depression talking — because these things seem minor, the “problems” seem abrupt…a lot of this came out of left field, with no signs that these things were causing difficulties until right now.
So I guess that’s my question. And the other half of my question is this: I feel like I’ve always tried to be there for her. When she was so depressed that she rarely answered her phone, I didn’t get mad when she screened her calls, blew off things we’d planned, wouldn’t answer her door. When she went off to Religious Recovery World and wrote me a letter basically saying, “Convert, ye heathen,” I mostly worried she’d been kidnapped by a cult, and when she came back, I stayed pissed for a while — couldn’t help it — but totally forgave her and was then sorry I’d ever been pissed in the first place.
When the friendship isn’t going the way she likes it, I feel like I’ve always been the one to change — to demand less (like letting her off the hook for call-screening and blowing-off-of-plans, something I don’t do for other friends), or to do what seems right for her (even after the break-up letter, I mailed her the stuff she asked for while she was in the Weird Religious Center). And now I’m really struggling — trying to work through something of my own — but if I won’t pick up the phone, she takes it personally. If I want to talk about something that’s bothering me, I need a therapist. Plus these new ways in which I need to change.
I feel like the entire relationship has been lived in the landscape of her illness, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s room for me; now that she’s on a slightly more even keel, and I’m trying to figure out how to find that balance in my own life, I’m wondering why I’m still the one being called on the carpet, why I feel like I’m still charged with the role of adapting and doing all the compromising. I don’t even know if that’s a fair question to ask, Sars, or if I’ve represented this fairly. So read between the lines, if you can, and tell me what you think about all this. You seem good at straightening out people’s tangled-up, miserable little crises. Maybe you can do something for mine.
Pathetically Confused About…Well, Everything
Dear Pathetically,
It’s a tough situation to gauge. Your friend is depressed, but your friend is also a pill, and whether that stems from the depression or not, she’s still a pill and you’ve still gotten sick of it.
She’s not well, and that’s unfortunate, but you have to make a decision about how you react to that. Do you want to chalk it up to her illness and let it slide? Or do you want her to hold up her end of the friendship a bit better, illness or no?
Take a break. Give yourself a few days or a week to look at things; ask yourself what you want out of the friendship, and whether she’s able to give that to you, now or in the future. Again, it’s tricky, because you feel like she’s not herself, but it’s possible that this is herself, and even if it isn’t, there’s no reason she can’t give you one measly hour to eat dinner before demanding your presence for The Serious Talk. She’s got problems, yes, but bending over backwards for her won’t solve them. Figure out how far you want to bend, and don’t bend any further.
Either she’ll respect that or she won’t, but if she doesn’t, maybe she’s just not a good friend for you at this particular point in your lives. She sounds awfully high-maintenance, and that’s not entirely her fault, but that doesn’t mean you have to deal with it and not get anything back.
[7/3/02]
Tags: boys (and girls) friendships sex
