I may never understand

So ok I still have another hour and a half before my flight. I don't feel like reading just want to write. Of course I am thinking a lot about Gary, turning things over and over in my head, and know that he reads this blog more or less religiously, or at any rate as religiously as a third-generation atheist can. I never liked that self- description by the way. It was as bad as being any other kind of fundamentalist, I think. Anyway. By absenting himself from my life he has become an abstraction, and as such fair game for theorizing. For one thing, I am seriously wondering whether he might have some form of ADD. I know that he can focus on things almost maniacally when he is in a state of wanting them or when he feels defensive or when he feels stimulated, but he is not so able to sustain a patient non-acquisitive interest or focus on things or ideas, and certainly could not on me. A few years into our time together he said to me in a snide tone that devastated me even then, "you expect me to still thrill you," and in fact he was right, yes, yes I did. That was a quality I wanted and still want very much in a partner, and a quality that I hope to be able to provide for whomever I find myself with next. If people are not put on the planet to thrill and entertain and delight each other, what are we here for, I wonder? I'm also thinking about how it is necessary to have the will and focus to continue to do that. Gary's "I just don't think it's going to work" in his deadly breakup phone call totally removed any sort of will from the equation. Relationships don't just "work" or "not work"; they take effort, concerted effort, and what underlies that effort needs to be a heartfelt desire for the delight of the beloved, and also a willingness to go into the unpleasantly galvanic or bumpy places that two people inevitably find themselves in together, without denial or avoidance or distraction. "I just wasn't strong enough to work on those things with you," he wrote me at the end, with, I imagined, a kind of helpless shrug. I don't understand why for so many years he so rarely told me what he wanted, and if what he really wanted was to fuck every bimbo on the train why he married me, because he had a choice in that, and why in fact he stayed with me for so long, and what thoughts he was repressing, and why he was so resistant to constructively tackling his own issues and our issues together. This is something I imagine I will feel sad and angry about for a very long time -- i hope not for my whole life -- like a big sulky gargoyle sitting on my torso. All those pernicious lies: stunning, really.

I was reading the current issue of scientific American at one of the airport newsstands recently and there was an article claiming that there are three different types if relationship personalities: secure, anxious, and avoidant, and these are very much influenced by how we were parented in early childhood. I think the dominant tendency for both me and Gary was to be anxious, although there was a time when we moved into security with each other; that was, at any rate, the promise of the union: "Let us no longer starve for love," he wrote. It wasn't so very much later that he moved into avoidant mode: shutdown. And then, of course, I was no longer so eager to work toward his delight, since he had become so inaccessible, and I felt subjected to a kind of constant low-grade rejection. Was that my fault? I keep wondering? To tolerate it? To stretch my loyalty until it became attenuated and then just snapped? What could or should I have done differently?

That I should have then gone on to fall for someone even more exaggeratedly avoidant makes me almost want to slap my own face. What is my problem?? What makes me and other humans so dreadfully gnarled up that we are compelled toward what hurts us? Is it a kind of death drive or desire for self-testing experiences??

Marianne describes how she would so often observe this situation with me and Gary: I would be dancing around, brimming over with something, and he would avert his eyes as if he was mortified by my behavior, by my kineticism and ebullience. I feel I will never know what was really going on inside him at such moments. I will never get to be a fly on the mucoid or muscly wall of his psyche. Was it a cultural difference? I somehow... embarrassed him? I may never understand.








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