There's Something About Harry

I’ve never been so happy to see February come.  For over a week now, there has been some one in our house that was disgustingly sick.  I was home with the kids all but one day last week, after returning from a weekend trip to Boston for WordCamp.  Thursday, I made it to the office for a day, thinking the kids were better, but two of them were sick again by the early evening. 

The third got sick about 1 am Friday morning, and I joined her, Mya, about an hour later.  I was completely wasted for about 24 hours and barely functional until late last night.  I was able to venture out into fresh air a couple times to watch the kids sledding Saturday after we got hit by a nice little snow/ice storm. 

Then later Saturday, my son got sick again, about 4 days after he got sick the first time.  I told him he was lucky that he had been OK, enough to go sledding while he could.  I think it was rolling down a hill of snow that ultimately put him over the edge and started him puking all over his snow boots.

Corbin was sick the rest of the night.  It had been a while since he had been that sick, apparently several years.  Despite the fact that he had just watched the rest of us empty our guts all week, he was very surprised that we couldn’t give him a pill or some medicine that would fix his eleven year old stomach. 

I had to think back a bit and the last time I could remember him being sick like that might have been when he was about 3 or 4 years old.  Talk about lucky, he just didn’t have the experience of being sick like that and literally didn’t know what to do, like not throw up on his own feet, the floor, etc.  He’s regularly been the kid in class that received perfect attendance awards.

I don’t think I ever received a perfect attendance award in my life.  When I was his age, I was typically sick with a flu bug like that at least a couple times a year.

He thought that after throwing up, he could just launch in and eat a couple hot dogs and drink 3 glasses of water.  Big mistake. 

I had to sit down with him and basically teach him how to be sick.

• No, there isn’t medicine that fixes this instantly
• No, you can’t drink as much as you want
• No, you can’t eat as much as you want even if you are hungry
• Yes, being sick might keep you awake most of the night
• No, you can not have something to help you sleep (too much TV commercials )
• Yes, its a good thing that you are awake, it might help save your life if you do throw up
• Yes, you have to carry a bowl with you when you walk back and forth to the bathroom
• In the immortal words of Jack Nicholson in the Bucket List, “You can’t trust a fart” (oops too late on that advice)

I had mixed feelings about the fact that he didn’t really know any of these life lessons.  It was awesome that he had been so healthy not to have gone through this and learned it the hard way, but I also felt like maybe I hadn’t done something sooner to teach him these basics sooner. 

The good news, he knows now!

Finally, last night after the family went to bed, my own appetite finally came back. I had eaten my first normal meal last night, but started actually getting hungry last night around 10PM.

I started doing some basic easy work, busy work you might say last night.  Stuff that needed to be done, but nothing that took a whole lot of brain power, concentration or effort.  I was saving that for today, for a fresh perspective unburdened by sickness and misery, and now that I’ve finally written a blog article after weeks and weeks it seems like, time to get going on that!

This week I’m heading home to the Peoria Illinois area where I’m originally from.  I haven’t been able to find any Vibram KSO Treks, the leather cold weather version of Vibram five finger toe shoes anywhere in the Carolinas.

Then I had an epiphany and remembered that I’d be travelling and maybe I could check some stores enroute to Illinois.

I did a search in Illinois first, and found a store in Peoria, on Main St.  I’m not sure, but it might be the same store that’s been selling running shoes in Peoria since well, about as far back as I can remember. 

They are called Running Central (no twitter account but they are on Facebook).

I called and talked to Adam I believe and sure enough they had one pair left in my size!  They reserved that last pair for me and I’m going to pick them up when I get there this week. 

Sooo can’t wait, plus, my toes won’t get as cold or wet running while I’m in Illinois.

Squishing the Biomass between My Toes
The audio is something of a podcast, or at least audio blog about my morning.  It all started when I dropped by my youngest daughters school for Donuts for Dads.  When I was leaving the school, I had every intention of going directly home and going to work on the computer, but just off to my right (the opposite direction from home) there sat this fine looking little mountain, called Crowders Mountain. . . .

If you have ever studied psychology at a basic level, you have probably been introduced to the theories of conditioning.  There was Pavlov’s dog who was conditioned to expect food when a bell rang, which triggered the dog(s) to drool when they heard the bell ring. 

Well there was a conditioning experiment involving an infant known as Little Albert.  This experiment featured an infant of about 11 months who had been tested and was not frightened of a white lab rate; he even tried to play with the critter a bit.

Well the experimenters started introducing a very loud noise whenever the lab rat was shown to the baby.  The baby could not see the source of the noise.  Eventually the neutral stimulus, the rate, began to instill the emotion of fear in Little Albert due to the combined presence during the test of the loud noise with the rat.  Little Albert was conditioned to fear the rat that he initially liked. 

This experiment was done in the 1920’s, the mother did not know about the experiment and eventually took her baby from the hospital they were in and left.  Today the experiment is considered unethical.  Experiments involving fear with people are generally not condoned.

Text Message from the Other Guy during Sex

So the other night my wife and I are enjoying an intimate moment.  Suddenly her cell phone buzzes and the room lights up as her phone comes to life with a text message. 

The message was from Hobie, her friend, and the source of my recent jealousy after I learned that my wife had befriended a guy she met while we were celebrating our honeymoon. 

For the most part, I have come to accept that my wife has a male friend and that they communicate very regularly via text, email, facebook etc.  I do not think she is cheating on me, I do not think she plans to have an affair with Hobie, etc. 

In the early days, I was surprised and felt a little blind sided by the establishment of this friendship and it hurt like hell, mostly because I was reacting and just didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Its been a few weeks, and I’m mostly over it.  But I still experience triggers that cause me to feel emotional pain.  I’m trying to work through those so that those triggers won’t cause emotional pain any longer.  Essentially I have to find a way for my rational mind to over come the irrational fear of losing my wife, the irrational jealousy of my wife’s friend who happens to be a guy that hit on her quite a bit, and the irrational feeling that I’ve failed my wife a bit since I’m not able to connect with her and communicate with her like this other guy can and apparently does.

Oh, and if I talk about any of this with my wife, it pisses her off, makes her mad, and in general makes the whole situation worse.  She feels like she is being dragged through the mud and punished for doing something she never did. 

Hell I now fear that if I talk to her about this, she will get mad or think more about leaving me for another guy.

So the problem is one of a feedback loop negatively reinforcing several behaviors.

My wife receives a text message from Hobie

When I notice (and I don’t see the majority of these messages, but ever few days I happen to see or hear, like when we are having sex) I feel a little bit of pain from the fact that he has instant electronic access to my wife whenever and where ever she is.

If I exhibit that pain, become morose, sigh deeply, grimace, etc, it makes my wife angry because she thinks I’m blaming her.

When she becomes angry, she clams up and won’t talk to me.  She fears anything she says will essentially be used against her.

When she clams up, she becomes more distant from me.

This in turn makes me feel even further removed from her (even though Hobie gets to talk to her) and that makes it harder for me to remain calm and balanced and feel like everything is ok, they are just friends etc. 

That makes me more distant and makes it difficult for me to give her the physical comfort and appreciation that she needs in the way of hugs and kisses and things.  ergo I’m having a hard time feeling it and then exhibiting it.

FUCK! Why can’t she just stop talking to him? 

That appears to be the obvious simple answer, but I won’t ask her to do that.  If he’s her friend, that’s fine.  She doesn’t ask me to turn away from my friends and I won’t do that to her.  We both need friends to stay healthy and happy , which makes it possible for us to stay connected and love each other.

So I instead have to find a way to de-sensitize myself to things like her texting with Hobie.

That’s what I have been doing, but a couple nights ago when she got a message during an intimate moment, I realize that technology (not becky and not her friend nor their relationship), but technology has created a situation where there are truly no barriers.

We can reach out and touch someone anytime, any day, any where.

My wife and I both use our cell phones for alarm clocks.  The damned devices are with us almost all day long every day.  I get calls late at night, typically for work, from my business partner and friend Joe Klein who is a few time zones away, sometimes from other friends or family, sometimes business meetings setup at late hours with other internet types who tend to burn the midnight oil.  This issue is one that has been felt by my wife far more than it has been in reverse.

She’s learned to cope with it better than I have in part because I was talking to people about business and she HATES talking with me about my business.  Which drives me to talk with others about it even more.  But also, when I talk with people about business it is never someone that my wife has met and seen me flirting with in a very physical way.  That’s because I don’t flirt with people in a very physical way mostly, no opportunity no problem has been my married moto I guess you could say.

She has texted a little bit with some of her friends and coworkers over the years, but it was almost never another guy, until recently.

So I’m learning to cope, but the negative emotional stimulus is still there and in the early days it rapidly conditioned me to feel negative emotions not only when he sent her messages but when her phone twirped at all.  She turned her phone to buzz for a couple days, which gave me a audible break from all the texting going on.  That did help, kind of like removing a person with cat allergies from a house full of cats.

Now when her phone buzzes or twirps, I get that sinking gut wrenching, my wife is leaving me feeling in my belly any more.   . . .  Well, except when the message comes from Hobie.  Then I do still feel something negative, especially when she is spending time with me, especially when that time is later in the evening and we are um  . . bonding.

I feel like we need a cell free zone in the bedroom or maybe in the bedroom after a certain time at night, even if it is just temporary until my Hobie allergies have a chance to completely subside.

Over the years I have moved from completely unorganized to completely organized and back again many times.  Typically, I make a decision to change and become more or less organized depending on where I am in my life and what I’m doing.

I tend to find that if I am too organized in an anal going to plan when to plan where to put your socks away, then my creativity suffers.

If I’m too unorganized then too much chaos prevents me from getting enough work done at all.

By the way, I realize this topic on the surface may seem rather mundane compared to my recent writing performing a lobotomy on my feelings trying to analyze my emotions and figure out what is going on with my relationship with my wife, but this actually relates a bit.

My wife and I are typically always the opposite of each other.  When I’m organized, she is not and vice versa.  This axiom pretty much holds true for everything about us.  Usually it keeps our relationship in balance in an opposites attract kind of way.

Over the recent few months, things have gotten even less organized for me than normal, and Becky has swung back from Uber Organized towards less organized after she started relaxing a bit after ‘completing’ her National Boards last spring. (Unfortunately, she has to redo part of her boards this spring, so her relaxation break is about over).

My work schedule has also focused on working nights mostly, since I work from home and need peace and quiet for a good deal of the work I do when I’m in a large project.  That night time work puts a little distance between Becky and I even though it gives me more time to spend with the kids.

So since the whole craziness surrounding the discovery that my wife had gotten extra-friendly with another guy, I’ve been looking at what I can do to change/improve myself, how we can repair/strengthen our relationship and a number of other things.

One of the things that I started working on (was already working on but now have a new focus and re-emphasis on importance) is getting more organized myself.

I’m in the midst of setting up 1 possibly 2 new offices, one in Charlotte for sure and I’m tentatively looking at setting one up in Savannah as well.  If I’m going to manage multiple work locations (home, Charlotte and Savannah) I need to be more organized.  If my wife and I are not going to be two ships passing in the night, we also have to be organized enough to know where we each are, when the other needs help or support, who has the kids on whichever event is happening on any given day or evening and a bunch of other stuff.

This weekend Becky and I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what we were going to be doing over the next month both in regards to work, the kids, business and personal travel, Christmas, parties, etc.

We organized it all through Google calendar, which updates both of our phones and is accessible via our computers.

That’s just an example, but we’ve actually been doing a number of things like that to get more organized, not just individually but together.  If we are going to be attracted opposites, we have to be a little synced up.

Planning my Future While in the Military

Years ago when I was in the Army, I had a lot of time on my hands.  Especially time where my mind was unoccupied, even though I might be humping a GP medium around on my back (probably couldn’t do that these days, but I could then).

It gave me a lot of time to plan in my head what I was going to do with my future.  Back then I had not been to college yet, and getting there was one of my primary goals.

I wasn’t as concerned with a number of the details of college, like what I would study nor which school I would go to.  I was focused on making it happen, getting there, and getting the most out of it while I was there. 

Back then, I didn’t have the wisdom to understand the importance of school and path of study as much, partly because I was a blank slate and I was talented and smart enough to do something useful with anything I learned.  I could do a lot of something with about anything.

Planning My Future While I Read Audio Books

Years later, I found myself planning my future again.  I was in college finally, and approaching the end of my first degrees.  I was also working full time for the USPS and running a business on the side.  I was kind of a busy guy.  Shortly after, Becky was pregnant with Corbin and life got more interesting.

During that time, not to mention my 52 mile round trip commute from home to school to work to home each day, I had a lot of time to think and plan.

I read hundreds of audio books back then.  When I had been in high school and the military I read hundreds of books and more too.  The reading gave me the perspective to think things through in my head and the material and resources to bounce possibilities around and weigh the good, the bad, the ugly and come up with a vision.

I would create short term action plans, but would not chart out the long term plan.  That was always more of a vision that I strode towards.

Back in late 2005 – 2006, I had an epiphany around the concept of new media, sometimes called social media these days, and something that will be called something completely different in 2 years, but will probably still have the world media some where near it.

I’ve been planning since that epiphany and gaining some experience around the concepts I’m working on the whole time.  But the last 8 months hasn’t really spared me enough time to plan the vision of how to get there.  That’s partly because more and more my work has become more focused on creating things and to push my creativity things became less organized to the point where I didn’t have as much time to plan and envision the future as I would like.

So that also is one of the reasons why I needed a bit of a change and a reset.  I even think this time around, I might try and perform my planning or ‘envisioning’ through my writing or maybe through audio or video, which might be more appropriate for rapid thinking.

Its been over a week since I went out with my wife and what I thought at the time was her online boyfriend, whom she had met first in real life while we were out celebrating our wedding anniversary.

I’ve taken the last two days off from talking or writing about this topic.  When all of this first happened, I was definitely having a difficult time trying to understand, decipher, cope, be supportive, not get mad, not drop into a massive depression, etc. 

Ultimately, writing about it, helped me immensely.  I just didn’t have anyone else to turn to in order to dig through all the facts and information.  I didn’t have anyone else to talk to about what I was feeling or what I should be feeling, if it was even appropriate or not.

I wrote quite a bit, probably something close to 20,000 words.  If this were NaNoWriMo, I’d be two thirds done with a novel. 

• Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend
• Recovering After the Date with My Wife’s Boyfriend
• Until Un-Happiness Do Us Part – The Perceived Risk of my Wife’s ‘Friend’
• Surprise! Your Wife Has Mail (from Him)
• How Do I Compete for my Wife’s Attention When He has as much Access to her as I do through Social Networks and Text Messages?

I was not writing for volume by any means. Just trying to get through things.  By the time I finished the fifth one, ergo my fifth day of therapy, my therapy was starting to hurt my wife. 

I did not want to turn this in to a zero sum game, where she hurts me, so I hurt her back.  I didn’t want to go out and find some other woman to turn things on my wife just to see how she would like it.  I did not want to harm her with my words either.  We have always had a difficult time talking about these things, which was why I wrote in the first place.

But early on, she started reading what I was writing (not always finishing for obviously long winded reasons) and she was starting to feel that my writing painted her too negatively, painted her actions too negatively, and she felt that this was putting her on the defensive.  Long story short, I don’t think Becky really thinks she did anything wrong.  She says she did not intend to hurt me.  She says that she didn’t realize that I didn’t know about her online relationship with Hobie.  Since I have never really gotten ‘jealous’ in the past, it was a surprise when all of this hurt me.

A New Kind of Jealousy

So in person, I am not the type of person that gets jealous.  Becky can flirt with someone all she likes and I will not really blink an eye.  I won’t really compete either.  If she wants to flirt she can, but I don’t play gladiator games with other guys to win her attention.  Its just not my way, never has been.  The lack of games like that is one of the reasons why I fell in love with Becky in the first place.

Years ago when I was single, I learned how to play those games.  I was very adept at it.  For the most part, I thought they were kind of stupid, and they usually torpedoed any chance at a better relationship with someone.  When I met Becky, we didn’t play any of those stupid games, and I think that is one of the reasons why our relationship lasted this long (16 years) already.

Fast forward to the present, and I don’t mind, never have if she flirts with another guy, but I’m not going to regress to the point where I have to play games to keep her love or attention.  I think she knows that and I think that when she flirts, she does so not to hook up with someone, not to fall in love with someone, she just does it because she likes the repartee’ or something.  I do too for that matter, and its something that is difficult to engage in with someone you’ve been married to for so long, because you know that just around the corner all flirting pretenses can evaporate in a minute or two.  With a stranger, the boundaries can remain up indefinitely.

But I’ve learned that I can be jealous of my wife when she has a constant and regular electronic relationship with another man via text messages, phone calls, chat messages, email and facebook.  I can be even more jealous when she doesn’t even let me know that this is going on.  It may not be in secret, it may not be hidden but its not in the light of day either.

Flirting in person, rarely lasts day after day, night after night for several weeks.  Meet a stranger in a club, bar, anywhere and you might have a few minutes, maybe time through out the evening to chat back and forth, but that is unlikely to turn into repeat sessions.

Meet a person online and you are connected, possibly forever.

They can see what you are thinking, what you are doing, who you are talking to, what you are talking about, they can see pictures of you regularly, your kids and family and more.

I do not live in an internet bubble by a long shot, but I don’t develop relationships like that with other people very often and can’t remember the last time I developed a relationship like that with another woman.

Talking and flirting electronically is essentially like passing love notes.  You may not be telling someone else that you love them like a third grader might, but passing messages back and forth with sexual overtones, double entendres, and other personal talk is essentially the stuff of love notes, maybe more at a high school level.

The electronics and the medium make it feel almost acceptable.  After all, if you can talk with your brother, your mother, your sister, your boss in that medium, then talking with a member of the opposite sex must be OK too.

If you aren’t sending dirty pictures back and forth, no phone sex or masturbation is involved, it must be all right?

Well, despite the fact that I am extremely , ummm, liberated, especially about what humans can or should be able to do, if you want to buy into the concept of monogamous relationships (which I think is stupid, but have agreed to for the happiness of Becky) then this type of activity is NOT ok. 

It seems to fall under the auspices of if you can’t do it in front of everyone else, then there must be a reason. 

If you think it would hurt your spouse, then maybe you should reconsider. 

If you think it would embarrass you or get you in trouble at work (sexual harassment or something) then maybe you should reconsider. 

If you think it would embarrass your or your family if it were done in front of them, maybe you should reconsider.

I do not think my wife was knowingly engaging in any activity meant to hurt me or destroy our relationship nor probably even build a physical relationship with Hobie. 

But I don’t think she thought through what she was doing either nor the repercussions.  That is partly because I’ve never been the jealous type before, and partly because the mediums of conversation are so easy and readily available to keep connections and conversations flowing.

She did end up hurting me because she didn’t make me aware of what she was doing with Hobie.  I wasn’t involved in the conversation.  I wasn’t privy to the conversation (not even in a voyeuristic manner).  She never really made that an option.

At one point, the height of my fear and angst, I toyed with hacking into her computer and trying to find out what she had been talking about with Hobie, but I backed away.  She might have been further down the rabbits hole than I realize, and I could be a fool, but if I had looked, it would have signaled the end of my trust of her and her trust of me. 

I would have gained everything in knowledge to lose everything in reality.

She tells me that she has backed away from her relationship with Hobie, telling him not to flirt with her and she says she is not flirting with him.  The communication has not stopped.  I can’t tell but hope it has decreased in quantity.  She’s been talking with him about his challenges dating another woman with the same name as my wife, counseling him basically.  I haven’t read these messages or conversations, but have heard second hand about them from her.

I’m more comfortable with this.  She could be pulling the wool over my eyes, but I don’t think she is.  If I’m wrong, well there’s nothing else I could do other than snoop on her in which case she might as well be lost to me anyway.  If I had to engage in an intervention to win her back or something, I’d probably consider it, but knowing her nature and her tendency to be extra stubborn when confronted I don’t think that would help.  I don’t even think she has mentioned this situation to other people in her family, even though they read my blog too.

Great Sex

The article before this one, I toyed with the notion about writing about what has essentially been great make up sex.  I backed off and instead wrote about some of the remaining aspects of things that were still troubling me. 

I should have written about sex.

Apparently, the last article really upset Becky quite a bit.  I think she was worried that no matter what she said or did, she couldn’t convince me that she wasn’t in love with Hobie and had no real intentions physically towards him.

But basically ever since this issue came up a little over a week ago, our sex life has been great.  In our relationship, sex has always been very good, and no matter what our issues were over the years, too much work, moving, school, trying to get pregnant, pregnant, weight problems, finances, health issues, moving again, Chinese mafia threatening to kill us, the sex has always been good and always something that we could both count on.

Since this situation arose, my wife has been off work mostly.  We’ve spent more time together over the last 9-10 days that we normally are, and we’ve been going at it like crazy.

I’m not going to go into all the lurid and fun details, but in addition to the writing, the sex has helped too.  Its possible for men and women to fake orgasms, but its not so easy to fake emotions, especially during the extended rounds of foreplay and sex that have kept us up late the last week.

Our sex life, wasn’t really lacking before this all happened.  It wasn’t slow and it wasn’t over done.  We’re probably slightly more active than the average couple in the US, having sex 2-3 times per week, some weeks more than that, never much less.  The trickiest thing about our sex life is our mis-matched work schedules, coming and going is our biggest problem, but once we meet up there is not much of an issue at all.

Becky is not frigid nor difficult to please.  I wouldn’t say she is ‘easy to please’ but she’s definitely not impossible to please either.  Some women have difficulty having orgasms, or can only have orgasms in a limited number of ways.  Becky is lucky compared to some women and can have orgasms in several different ways and combinations.  As her husband, that makes my life relatively easy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t try regardless. 

Over the last week, we’ve been putting in the extra effort so to speak, and its been a very very pleasant week, and I guess enough said about that.

Where to Go from Here?

I now know that I AM the Jealous type when it comes to some situations, especially secretive or non-transparent ones online.  That’s not something I knew 2 weeks ago.  Even though it has been painful, I do savor the opportunity to learn something new about myself.

I have learned some new things about Becky as well and that is a good thing too.

I do not know if she has grown as much during this event as I have.  I hope so, but I am not sure.  She’s still a little closed about a lot of this so its hard for me to tell.

I dislike the fact that we may have both just gone through the crucible and possibly only one of us benefited from surviving it.  I do want Becky to know that I do not mind if she has male friends online or off.  I do not care if she flirts with guys in person, especially if I’m there.

I do mind if she maintains a regular and constant online relationship in the form of multiple conversations each day electronically and that communication includes flirting dialog.  That does bother me and does make me jealous.  I do think that can result in feelings and later temptations that she might not want to resist.  I think if she keeps these private from me, then she is essentially opening the door to meet someone, fall in love or lust with them, have an affair and I would be completely blind sided.

As a guy, who is relatively nice, kind of tall, not too fat, and doesn’t look much like a troll, I have to be careful not to let myself get into situations where physical temptations, especially if alcohol is involved, might get the better of me and I would do something that would hurt Becky.  Its not happened yet, and that is largely because I am careful not to let it happen.

I think that Becky unwittingly walked into an area where the risk of something happening eventually was there.  She was confident for several reasons that she would have said no or shut it down, but I’m not as confident largely because I was not aware of what was going on, what did go on, or just how close she actually got with Hobie.  I’ll never know if I our relationship was on a razor’s edge of a cliff or if it was ten miles back from a rolling slope of a hill.

But I do want Becky to be more aware in the future of the danger and of what she now knows hurts me, something I didn’t even know 2 weeks ago.

I can’t handle going through this on a regular basis.  Its not something I’m going to get used to, grow into, or learn to accept.  If she develops an online relationship with a man, flirts with him in person, talks with him through out the day for days on end and doesn’t tell me about it, I’m going to be hurt, and I’m going to look at it in the future like she is trying to create an opportunity for something to split us up.

I do not think she will do that, but based on what I have learned about myself and our relationship, I can’t see any other way to view that type of thing in the future.  I do not think it is unreasonable.

I do think Becky loves me, and I doubt this will come up again, until some dumb ass techy nerd develops some social network that allows people to communicate by reading each other’s minds from a distance.

Then we are all either in trouble or on a fast track to a real free love society.

Over the last few days, I’ve written about the pain and hurt I’ve experienced as I was surprised with the knowledge that Becky, my wife of 16 years, had developed a ‘relationship’ with another man she met on our anniversary. 

She met this man, whom I will call Hobie, when Becky and I were celebrating our anniversary on Halloween. We were out to have a good time, drinking at Howl at the Moon, a dueling piano bar in Charlotte.  It was our first time there, and it was part of our regular date night efforts to get out and away from the kids about once a month.

I met Hobie first as Becky and I sat at a bar that faced the live music.  He was sitting on my right, and Becky was on my left.  I said hello, introduced myself and Becky and figured we might be there for several hours, might as well get to know our neighbors.

Howl at the Moon is a dueling piano bar where the audience typically gets involved and sings along all night long.  No place for a cold fish to sit next to a stranger.

After a couple drinks, Becky began to get more comfortable in the place.  It was her first dueling piano bar experience, my third.  During one of my trips to the restroom, she swapped seats with me and sat next to Hobie.  I didn’t think much of it and sat in her seat when I came back.

As the night progressed, she began flirting with Hobie and he flirted right back.  It was a physical kind of flirting probably initiated by Becky, because she is a flirt.  It probably started with her brushing up against him, or putting her hand on his knee or thigh or something.

Eventually he reciprocated and that led to hands on backs, and when I wasn’t present during other trips to the restroom, out right groping, maybe a snuggle or hug or something.

Hobie wasn’t the only guy that night.

There was another guy dressed up as a large Charlie Brown and there with a lady dressed as Lucy.  They had sat on my new left side.  Apparently, Charlie Brown was feeling my wife a bit as well as she told me later.

That’s a bit ironic because Charlie Brown and Lucy both seemed very offended that Hobie was ‘flirting’ with my wife when I wasn’t present.  When I was present, I didn’t mind.  Becky is beautiful but doesn’t get out a lot.  I think it is healthy for her to feel beautiful and be adored by other people, men and women.

She has fought very very hard to control her weight over the years, especially after 3 kids.  Her appearance is something that she isn’t terribly confident about her looks.  So when a guy or multiple guys or people engage her, tell her she’s beautiful, flirt with her etc it really helps her feel better, feel good about herself. 

I think she is beautiful anyway, but she completely lights up when she feels good about herself. 

She comes out of a bit of a shell that working as a school teacher and coming home to a house of 3 kids, sometimes locks her up in. Its great to see her receive this positive feedback.  I welcomed it then and I still do now.

When a Physical Meeting turns into an Online Relationship

I’m not going to completely rehash the ensuing developments after that point.  I’ve written about it already to deal with my own emotions about what happened after that night.

1. Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend
2. Recovering After the Date with My Wife’s Boyfriend
3. Until Un-Happiness Do Us Part – The Perceived Risk of my Wife’s ‘Friend’
4. Surprise! Your Wife Has Mail (from Him)

Here are some of the things I know now, some things that have changed even since I wrote the previous articles.

I seem to have developed a temporary need to identify what I know.  This is partly because my world was turned upside down last week and stating what I know helps me get a grip on the new reality that still has some ripples running through it.

• Becky friended Hobie on Facebook 3 days after our anniversary
• They began texting each other a lot (a lot defined in terms of multiple times a day)
• They talked on the phone
• They exchanged emails through her personal email account
• They exchanged emails through her work email account
• I think they chatted on Facebook
• They chatted on Yahoo! Messenger
• Hey asked her out (with a group) and I was invited to go along as the designated driver for her
• He talked with her about a girl he wanted to date (coincidentally had the same name as my wife, she does exist, I met her when we all went out last Friday) – My wife probably counseled him about this other girl
• In her words, she flirted with him when they talked online
• He lives a few miles away, his address is on his facebook profile, my wife’s is not, but I’m not hard to find.
• He’s recently divorced and older than my wife.

I know more than that but I’m not trying to break confidences, just trying to understand things in my own head.

That said here are some things I don’t know.  I do not know if

• they ever met when I wasn’t present
• I don’t know if she talked to him about our kids.  She knows a bit about his kids
• I don’t know what he wants from her, but I think he is lonely and sex is probably one of the things he’s interested in, but conquering the loneliness is probably high on his list too
• I don’t know what he thinks of his relationship with my wife
• I know she doesn’t know what to think of her relationship with him, she calls him a friend, but short of a female friend at work, I think she talks to him more than any other friend online.

I read a few articles today that all were written from the perspective of ‘what is an online affair’.  I was trying to understand just what my wife has with this other man.  If he were gay, I think this would all make sense.  He’d be her very close gay friend, whom she confides in heavily and flirts with casually knowing that he is gay and nothing will ever come of it.

I’m pretty sure that Hobie is not gay and more sure that my wife knows this too.

The articles all had a common and severe flaw, which I will call the Cosmopolitan Flaw.

They are all written in a way that helps you identify what an Online Affair is.  They attempt to define an online affair, but they do it in a gypsy fortune telling kind of way, listing out things that are characteristic of an online affair, but don’t really spell it out.

They leave everything to the interpretation of the person that reads them and they read like a Cosmo questionnaire

‘10 ways to tell if your boyfriend thinks that you think that he thinks that you feel that his feelings are something that you should consider talking about with his mother when he’s present but only if he’s paying attention to you and you are not half crazed!”

Examples

10 Clues of an Online Affair

Know if you are Having an Online Affair

How to Respond to Your Spouse’s Affair

Top 6 Reasons People Cheat

How Has the Internet Changed the Way People Chat (on a site called Online Affairs – Truth About Deception)

These articles proved to be terrible. 

They were written well.  They follow all the rules of a good online Linkbait, an article designed to rank well in search engines and bring people in to read them when they do a Google search on a topic such as ‘online affairs’ which is what I did, hook set.

They were terrible because I feel like they missed the mark.  They were also very dated.  More fitting for the online environment before unlimited texting and social networking tools like Facebook. 

My wife does not feel that she is having an affair with Hobie.  I don’t feel like she is having an affair with Hobie either.

That doesn’t make her relationship with Hobie make me feel any better.  This was the only element in these articles that really resonated with me.

Your spouse doesn’t necessarily have to sleep with someone for their relationship with another person of the opposite sex to have an impact on you, to hurt you or make you feel bad.

Social networking sites are designed to make it easy for people to come together, to talk, to get to know each other, to develop a friendly ‘relationship’, to become friends, and yes to become something more than friends.

The thing is they are all very very new.  We are still learning how to relate with each other on Facebook.  Yes it is easy, its very cool to catch up and get to know long lost friends all over again.

But it is also far far easier for a healthy relationship with a new or old friend to grow very fast.  The velocity of that growth can happen quickly and when you are in the heat of the moment, this great new conversation you are having, a terrific back and forth, something that begins to spread from Facebook to email as you get a message from facebook via email that someone responded to you and before you know it, you are skipping facebook and sending an email.  Then your signature gets sent to this person and you are talking on the phone or texting back and forth on cell phones all day and night.

Suddenly this Facebook friendship is not just on Facebook, you are connected to this other person in a half dozen ways, and the conversation is great.

I think that is the relationship my wife has with Hobie. 

I do not begrudge the relationship, I have not asked her to stop. (I want to ask her to stop, but I can’t.  It doesn’t feel appropriate.  I want her to be satisfied with me.  I don’t want to artificially influence her holding the marriage thing over her head.  If I have to do that, I’ve lost her.)

When the surprise of their relationship hit me, I was pretty much dumbfounded.  It hurt and I didn’t know what to do.  I wanted to shout and scream but I feared that if I acted outwardly in a stupid, juvenile, immature way, it would make me less attractive and appealing and him more so. 

I didn’t want to provide the ugly contrast to the amazing conversation they were having together.

But today when I read these articles, I stepped right in it.  I left my computer open as I was going to take a shower.  My wife needed to borrow it real quick (so she could look at some pictures he had sent her via email of our recent night out).

She saw the articles and said something along the line, so you think I’m having an online affair.  She got upset and I saw the walls and barriers go up before my eyes.  She was already heading into the bedroom to take a nap.  I developed a head cold last night and slept in this morning.

She thinks that I am taking this whole thing too far, that I am making more of it than is really there.  I want to believe her as that will indicate that he is in the past.

But they still talk.  He may even become a friend for the long haul.  We talked last night when we were being much more open with each other (our conversations go through waves these days where we are communicating well and then as I relapse into a bit of pain, not so well). . . We talked about possibly setting him up on a date with a friend of ours who is a similar age and also single.

I definitely have ulterior motives.  If he had a relationship of his own, I’d be more comfortable with his friendship with my wife, but currently he doesn’t.

Plus this is the day before Thanksgiving.  He’s a recently divorced dad preparing to be alone on Thanksgiving.  Its the most natural thing in the world to reach out to anyone that will talk with him, even my wife.

So as I woke up today, I heard my wife’s text message going off one after the other.  Its probably her friend Sue, but I don’t know that.  I don’t read her text messages.  It could be Hobie flirting with her again, maybe making jokes about pumpkin pie and ice cream.

I have no fucking idea what they might be talking about, or if they are talking much at all, but this is one of the things that I’m still having a hard time coping with just 5 days after ‘the group date’.  (Ha! I found a slightly less hurtful way of talking about it.  )

A few weeks ago, I was in Illinois.  My younger brother Troy had just had his second heart attack.  I was worried for him and about him, and wound up tight as a steel trap.  Like the dumb ass I can be sometimes, I actually ended up having an argument with him (post heart attack, like he needed that) about why he should quit smoking and fight to survive.

There were things that needed to be said by me to him and by him to me, but we both did it in the completely wrong way at the wrong time and it pretty much just sucked overall.

Not always easy to communicate with family. 

One of the things he said though is resonating with me today.  It was something along the lines of

“When we talk on the phone, we talk about unimportant stuff, how work is going, how the family is, business ideas and brainstorming things.  But who do you (Brett) confide in?  Who is that you can talk to about things?”

That’s one of my problems.  I do confide in people.  I confide in my friend Joe Klein and we talk 3-4 times per week.  When I can catch up with him, I confide in my friend Bob Shipton as well, but he’s not easy to catch up with and those confidences only get shared a couple times of year these days.

Some things I confide in Becky, but those barriers I’ve thrown up to protect her from my conversations have stopped me from being able to confide in her completely.  Our discussions drive her nuts. literally.

I can look at a subject from a dozen different angles, talk about it from one, and in her words, half way through a sentence change my mind and my perspective and then explore the other line of thought.

I told her I approach sex the same way. 

With conversations (not sex) Becky likes me to get to the point. Long discussions in depth about a subject just isn’t something she enjoys like shallow flirting all day long with some guy she met at a bar. 

That was a cheap shot and I apologize.  But that would be a direct to the point statement as opposed to how I normally would look at it from a bunch of different angles to better understand her perspective. 

So My blog is my Confidant

So for me, writing in this blog, has evolved recently into something of a new type of therapy for me.  It is helping me confide and get the thoughts out of my head.

Becky reads my thoughts sometimes (I don’t think she read the whole article yesterday.  )  When she does read my blog, its finally like I am getting a chance to confide in her and we do talk afterwards.  Other people read it as well and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I’m a blogger and I do try to be a real person.  I typically try to help people online, I don’t typically seek out help. 

My wife doesn’t seem to have a Confidant however.  I don’t think she is confiding in me, I don’t think she is necessarily confiding in him either.  She might be confiding a bit in her friend Sue, but I’m not sure.

When I read the stupid quiz that helps a person get past their denial and figure out if they are having an affair, “Know if you are Having an Online Affair”

Here are the questions (there’s more written with them on the article, but I want to focus on a couple that actually seem relevant)

1. How much time do you spend online?

2. Do you look forward to spending time with your online “friend?”

3. Is your online friend a secret?

   Have you shared the fact that you have an online friend with your spouse? Do you keep it to yourself because you know your spouse would react negatively? Maybe you don’t tell because the idea of having a friend your spouse doesn’t know about is exciting to you.

4. Do you share relationship issues with your online friend?

5. Is your online friend a better listener than your spouse?

   When you share person details and problems, does your online friend always respond in the way you need? Do you find yourself wishing your spouse cared as much as your online friend seems to?

6. Are you beginning to recent your spouse?

7. Do you have less interest in sex with your spouse?

8. Do you exchange photos with your online friend?

9. Have you suggested a “real life” meeting with your online friend?

   Meeting for lunch or coffee will soon become a topic of discussion. Online affairs almost always lead to a desire to meet each other in real life. That is when something you think is harmless becomes destructive.

   Don’t be fooled by the denial and rationalizations you have made about your online friend. Keeping it online may be something you can live with. It may, in your mind be OK since the two of you are not having sex. Whatever you are telling yourself about it, it will eventually turn into more than you went looking for in the first place.

http://divorcesupport.about.com/od/infidelity/ht/online_affair.htm

The tips section actually seemed a little more useful than the Cosmo-esque, read this and you will probably find something in it that you can use to pigeonhole yourself one way or the other.  How about a horoscope to while you are at it?

Tips:

1. Get rid of your denial. Be honest with yourself and what you are doing. Being honest about your behavior is the only way to determine if what you are doing is worth the pain it will cause your spouse and family.

2. If you decide to end the online affair expect to be emotionally uncomfortable. You’ve formed a bond with another human being. Breaking that bond is going to take will-power.

3. Spend less time online and more time doing things that will impact your life positively. Exchange your negative behavior for one that will enrich your marriage and family.

4. If you find it impossible to break off the affair get help. You don’t have to do it alone. See a therapist or talk to trusted friend. Share what you are going through with someone willing to help you handle the negative emotions you are feeling.

All that said, I don’t think any of those tips will help my wife Becky.    They just don’t seem to completely fit (possibly a little denial there on her part).

I think we are living in something that is an evolution or two past the old generic ‘online affair’ notion.

Hers is currently more of a relationship.  Bill Clinton may not have had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but he did pretty much have sex with her.

My wife has a relationship with Hobie, but so far no sex.  Sex is probably not in the cards for their relationship, but just like a sexual relationship I still see his ghost hovering when she is on her computer, I hear the chains of his ghost rattling every time she gets a text message. 

I’m not so much jealous as envious that he has a relationship with her that I don’t.  He has something that I wanted, have wanted for years.

So that’s how I’m screwed up today.  I’m a little better than I was when this started, still coping, still trying to deal with this, somewhat better for making the effort, but I’ve got too many nooks and crannies in my brain to shake out and clean of the bile that is this issue with Becky’s male friend.  My big challenge at the moment is balancing my own needs to confide in someone or something (this blog) and not drive her away from me.

When she sees me writing this blog, I think its starting to hurt her.  That’s not what I want.  She’s been very supportive, but I think if I cross a line that it will bring my worst fears into reality, I might lose her, or shut her real feelings off from me forever.  But at the same time, I’m a little too screwed up to keep this crap bottled up inside of me.

One more day past, until tomorrow, or maybe if I can tough it out and not have a relapse, maybe sometime later . . .

Would it trouble you if your wife starts getting email from another man?

Odds are she gets emails from other men every day, all day long, just like everyone else in the world. 

Its a little different however, when that email comes from a man that you have recently seen man handling your wife a bit . . .  hmmm maybe touchy/feely/patting/rubbing your wife might be a more apt description.

That was the surprise that I had to deal with last week, when I wrote ‘Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend ‘.  I was having a great week, things were coming together, life was good. 

Then a brand new reality hit me between the eyes.  A reality that was there before, just out of my range of vision.

Becky, my wife of 16 years, had met another guy on our anniversary (Halloween).  I was there, sitting next to her.  We were all having a good time and I was happy for her, getting attention from other guys.

One of those guys Friended her on Facebook 3 days later.  I didn’t notice nor see it in her stream.

I don’t pick apart my wife’s Facebook stream and read every single thing she writes or that others write in it.  I’m interested, but the way Facebook works it just doesn’t show me everything, unless I go to her profile and look at her Wall every day.

So I missed that new friendship she created with a guy she had been heavily heavily flirting with a couple days before when we were out celebrating together, our monthly date night amplified by our anniversary, and the first time we’ve celebrated it alone since we had kids 11 years ago.

There is no real significance other than unfortunate timing that my wife picked up a guy on our anniversary I guess. I suspect there are some serious fucking taboos for a husband to pick up a girl while out with his wife on their anniversary, but I’m not sure if that goes both ways.  Maybe its a double standard, maybe its just a silly taboo in my own head, but for whatever reason, it did not bother my wife that night.  It did not bother me, that night either.

I did not expect that bond/phsyical relationship to go anywhere else at all afterwards.  So I was not worried nor concerned about losing Becky.

Ironically and BIG FAT DISCLAIMER HERE . . . SOMETHING Becky reminds me that I have failed to mention, that night on our anniversary, I did know about the flirting and groping.  I did not discourage it.  I was fine with it, even encouraged it, not in a goading sort of “Hey why don’t you go rub up against that guy so I can watch.” kind of way, but more in a “if you are having a good time flirting with the guy sitting next to you when I’m here and more fun when I’m in the bathroom, have fun.  Enjoy yourself.”

But we live in an extra connected super social world these days.  I should know, I work as a web designer, blogger and social media type.

I know the ins and outs of the business pretty well at this point, and I know social media pretty well as well.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me that a Facebook friend connection developed afterwards.  In general, in my business, many many people friend each other extremely casually, for almost no reason other than networking.

Personally, I’m not as cavalier with my Facebook friends.  I will connect with anyone on LinkedIn for business networking.  I will selectively follow people that carry on conversations on Twitter and allow anyone short of a spammer or stalker to follow me there.  But on Facebook, I try to limit my friends to people that I have met in person, know somewhat well and generally, like.

Those categories all fit for my wife and her new man friend.  They met in person, they got to know each other fairly well physically.  They had a good time together singing along to music all night, and a Facebook connection even by my crusty old standards was not terribly nuts.

I just never saw it coming.  I never saw it happen.

I don’t tell my wife every time I make a new Facebook friend.  I don’t tell my wife every time I add a new Facebook friend that is a woman.  I do tend to tell her if I have added a Facebook friend that I have slept with (decades ago before we got married and that list is pretty short).  She tends to mention that to me as well.

But this situation seemed different to me, still does.  I’m not saying it is or isn’t, just feels that way to me due to everything involved:

• Our Date Night adventure
• Our Anniversary
• The significance of our first anniversary away from the kids
• The fact that they met and had a lot of physical contact, then became friends. 
• Take that last item and add to it that she did not tell me that she was still talking with the guy, who I’m going to call ‘Hobie’ (that’s not his name, but is a code word that Becky will probably understand when she reads this.  I feel like I have to give him a name, and I do not want to use his real name.  I’m not convinced that he has any blame in this situation (its possible but I’m deferring judgment)
• Despite having my business card (and hers I think) Hobie, chose not to Friend me on Facebook.  I never expect gratitude, but if a guy lets another guy fondle his wife at a bar, you’d think the beneficiary could at least be civil after the fact and offer to be a friend, or mention, I had a good time hanging out with you and your wife the other night, hope things didn’t get too carried away and that we can be friends, so I’m sending you and your wife a Friend request. 
  • He didn’t do that, so in my mind even though she may not have been sneaking around, I think he was.
  • I think she did not see that he was sneaking around, but she should have because lets face it, guys tend to have sex on the brain.  Especially single guys, and especially single guys that have just spent the night fondling a woman that continues to talk with them on Facebook, Yahoo chat, Yahoo email, and on her work email. 

Whether Becky realizes or realized it or not, she was continuing to send out steady signals to Hobie that she was interested in him after a sexually charged introduction and encounter and unlike the night when we were out together and she was flirting with another guy in front of me, she was now sending off these follow up signals where I could not see.

I don’t think I’d mind this half as much if she had slept with him that night and I had known.  I probably would not have participated but knowing and giving my blessing as her husband would have made it ok in my book.

This doesn’t feel OK because it got hidden behind closed technological doors.

Helicopter Parents and Helicopter Spouses

A friend of mine shared this article from Time Magazine called “The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting”.  It is a very good article and as the parent of 3 kids, I completely relate with the article.  (The article also talks about Lenore Skenazy and her experience being dubbed by Google as one of the worst moms in the world or something.  I think she’s a great mom from what I’ve read myself.)

We’re not on the worst end of being helicopter parents, but due to the culture of so many families all operating at this over parenting level, our kids literally can not play with other kids outside in our neighborhood.  The other kids just do not come outside to play.  They only go where there are organized sporting events.

It is terrible. 

I was reading this article while I still had the situation with Becky and myself on the brain.  In particular, late last night, a casual comment she made on Facebook about going running with a friend (female) from work last night caught my attention.

Two people had pushed the ‘Like’ button on Facebook.  One of those people was Hobie.

I suddenly felt all the crap and bad shit all over again (at a smaller level).  This guy is in my wife’s life and he’s not really going away.  I do think my wife has the capacity to love, friend, help other people, not just me.  I’m not selfish for her attention, but the injury that I felt from some of the things listed above and more, are still fresh wounds.  So every time I see Hobie connect with Becky online or in the real world (see Recovering After the Date with My Wife’s Boyfriend ) it rips open part of that un-healed wound all over again. 

Yes it is scarring over and not as raw as it was originally, but its not fully healing each time either before its split open again.

I realized that one of the things that makes parents, ‘Helicopter Parents’ is that all this extra connectivity from cable news about molesters and child abductions, to mobile phones and text messages and emails with their kids and teachers, to web cams and much much more.  It all pounds us with this extra information about the perils and evils and dangers of life.

Our natural reaction, is to shield our kids behind us with our backs to the fire and fend off the danger.  That is just how we are wired.  The more danger that presents itself (electronically) the more we get our hackles up and try to fend off the perceived danger.

That’s what is partly happening with Hobie and Becky’s online relationship.

I’m seeing small snipits of their online relationship, things in her Facebook stream like them Friending each other early in November.

I went back and looked after the fact, she also friended 2-3 other guys this month.  I have no idea how many people I friended in the same time period nor how many may have been women.

I have seen snipits where she has talked with him back and forth in chat messages on her computer.  I’ve seen emails (subject/sender not body) that he sent her on her computer, when she left her screen open one afternoon for several hours.  Not exactly hiding from me, but seeing his name after I realized they had a relationship in emails bothered me.

As a guy that loves Becky and doesn’t want to lose her, I see a handful of danger signals

• Physical flirting >
• Turned to new online relationship >
• Grown into continued conversations and relationship >
• Resulting in invitation by him to her to go out again, oh and ok bring your husband too if you need a designated driver (btw Becky doesn’t remember passing on the invitation to me only to come as the designated driver, but she did want me to be the designated driver.  )
• And then following that night out (almost can stop calling it a date) they are still in contact

I have not asked Becky to stop talking with him.  She has stated that they are friends.  I would not be happy if she asked me to stop being friends with someone, and I will not ask it of her.  I have not asked her not to un-friend him on Facebook either.  Although last night in a week moment I seriously though of doing the extremely stupid and immature thing of changing my relationship status from ‘Married’ to ‘Its Complicated’.

I think those relationship status things are really stupid in general, but I felt like doing it (tired from night of work and emotionally disturbed from seeing his latest contact with her) . . . I felt like doing it to signal to her that I do see a problem in our relationship.

I have mentioned before that a bunch of this is my own issue.  Something I need to work through and get out of my system.  But we are a team, a couple, we love each other.  If something hurts me, its hurting us.  If something hurts her, it hurts me. 

Hobie’s relationship with my wife has hurt me. 

I wish it hadn’t.  I wish I wasn’t vulnerable like that.  I think if Becky and I had simply been dating or living together for 16 years, I might even be a little more equipped to deal with this, but that’s one of the problems with marriage.  It makes you believe falsely that your relationship with the person you love is safe, just because of some stupid promise and a document.

Relationships are never safe.  They have to be protected and worked at all the time.  I know this, because I’ve seen to many fail from lack of protection and work.  Or in too many other cases because the couple lost or never had the key to making the relationship work from go.  That fatal flaw in their relationship that ultimately breaks them apart.

Becky and I have a fatal flaw like that in our relationship.  We have built up these barriers to protect ourselves over the years, protect ourselves from each other, and that is the weakness in our relationship that opens the door for disaster.

It could have probably happened the opposite way as well. 

• Becky needs someone to lavish affection on her in front of other people.  She needs to be flirted with, and touched. 
• I need someone to have deep conversations with.  I need to have that love for their thoughts and mind rekindled all the time.
• Becky can’t talk with me in depth, if I’m not lavishing affection on her.
• I can’t lavish physical affection on her if she’s not talking with me in heart to heart conversations about what is important.

Our needs are caught in a catch 22 (she abhores the concept and the word ‘paradox’ and ironically I love it).

We have to do something about this weakness together I think.  We have to be aware that it is a weakness.

Superman can’t defend himself from kryptonite if he doesn’t know that kryptonite can hurt him.  Same goes for our relationship.

In this case, something came between us because she was not talking with me and I was not lavishing attention on her.

In many ways, I think we are safe because it happened this way.

If it had happened in reverse.  If I had met a girl in that bar that night and instead of touching her and fondling her, but had had this amazingly deep conversation with her that night, and then a few days later engaged in the act with that girl that Becky needs most ‘lavishing of physical attention’ but done that in a setting where Becky could not see and then Becky later found out.  I think Becky would have been extremely hurt, as I have been.

So the two of us have to be aware of this situation and problem so that we can work to not set ourselves up in a situation where we are superman walking into a kryptonite esspro shop needing a shot of caffeine and not realizing that it comes with a kick of kryptonic self destruction.

Its All in the Unveiling of the Bad News

When I was young, I read the book the Hobbit about 7 or 8 times.  I read the Lord of the Rings a few times as well, but the first book was my favorite.  There’s a short story that is part of that book where the group of elves and hobbit and maybe gandolf too have been traveling for days and they desperately need refuge for the night.  There is a character whose name might be Beoren or something.  He’s a half man half bear, looks like a man during the day and changes into a bear at night.  He’s a hermit, bear man too and doesn’t like large groups of people.

So there are like a dozen/maybe 14 people in the group and that is far too many, so they devise a plan where a person or two will go introduce themselves and then additional people will show up at intervals by twos.

The first two arrive, introduce themselves and start to tell their tale of adventure, and then they hint at the their friends (not present) and just as Beoren is asking about these friends, two more dwarves show up.  This repeats over and over until the entire band of travelers are present and Beoren has been able to accept them all a bit at a time.

In this situation with my Becky and Hobie, the situation was revealed to me in a fantastically terrible way.

I didn’t know about the new friendship after our anniversary celebration and my Becky meeting Hobie.  I didn’t know that the relationship was kindling into a friendship or anything.  Then suddenly I was hit with the existence of the relationship, the invitation that sounded as if it were designed for them to meet together again, and my bit role in that future meeting, followed by evidence on top of evidence in the cyber world that indicated that their relationship had grown over the previous 2-3 weeks, but none of that evidence was qualitative, ergo I couldn’t read the chat messages, the emails, the facebook chats or messages.  I had no grounding for how fast or serious things might have developed.  I didn’t know if there were cause for alarm in this situation or not.

But I did immediately realize that are relationship had a weakness, I wasn’t keeping Becky happy, and that our barriers could be used to split us apart.  That knowledge drove the fear of my first article, and I’ve been striving to keep up with putting a cap on that fear and moving forward in a positive way since.

I’m getting there.  Becky and I are getting there.  We are making progress, but I do desperately look forward to the day where the reminders of this situation stop piling up on top of me at all the wrong times, in all the wrong ways.  I say that after I just spent 2 hours writing this article, relatively short at around 3,000 words compared to some of the others.  If total word count indicates my passion on the topic, or my pain spilling over, I think I’m over the top of the bell curve of pain right now and on the downward slope. 

I hope its a slope and not one of those fucking long tails.  I need the long tail of pain like I need my wife to have a secret boyfriend. 

Addendum – About 4 paragraphs up or better, Becky and I talked on the phone several times as she was driving home.  It was one of the best conversations we have had on this topic yet, and might also be part of the reason why I was capable of slimming this article down a bit.  Thanks Becky, I know you are not trying to hurt me.

Love Brett

Today is Monday, and all in all I’m doing better today.  After writing a significant amount yesterday about my wife, Becky’s ‘friend’, I then went out and ran in the cold rain for a long time.  It felt like 7-8 miles in a good way, but when I added it up a little bit ago, it was actually about 6.3.

I was running in my Vibram Five Finger toe shoes with my new toe socks that I picked up on Saturday at Rack Room Shoes.  The toe socks are a ridiculous multi colored affair, but the real purpose was to have something to keep my feet slightly warmer, and to reduce the amount of sweat in the shoes, until I can find some better actual running socks for toe shoes.

They make running shoe toe socks, but they cost $12 per pair, which seems kind of ridiculous to me.  I’m cheap and practical, function over form mostly, and I haven’t quite warmed to the idea of paying $12 for a pair of socks, 6 or 7 pair would cost more than the shoes!

For those of you that were wondering why my wife might look to some other guy for something missing in her life, you are probably not so surprised now that you’ve seen my new socks.

Anyway, all that writing, dumping my conflicted thoughts out on a blog, and then running off some of the built up anxiety and I don’t know what in my system definitely helped.  It actually helped a WHOLE lot.

I’d also like to clear up a couple points, even though I’ve kind of stated a couple of these before.

• My wife is not a bad person.
• I’m as sure as I can be that she has not actually had sex with her friend, and probably not with anyone since we have been married.  I say that not in a suspicious way, just pretty sure that it is the truth.
• She probably has not gone as far as to kiss another guy since we’ve been married either.
• She does read my blog from time to time (more so lately I think.)  And I guess if nothing else, this whole experience has probably locked me in with a solid new reader. 
• We are talking through this stuff both in person and via email.
• Finally, I’m going to stop calling my wife’s friend, her boyfriend.  I used that term quite a bit and it has certain emotional connotations, which signify the way I felt, the hurt I was feeling, the risk of things escalating and a bunch of other things.
  • • She does not view him as a boyfriend.  Other than me leaving her alone on a bar stool while I headed to the can at a bar with him on Halloween and Friday night, I don’t think she has ever been alone with him elsewhere, no dates, lunch, coffee etc.  If it were our kids (middle school and younger) we would jokingly refer to a similar type of friend as a boyfriend or girlfriend.  I specifically did not use the word lover or sexual partner for example when I wrote previously.  I use humor as a defense mechanism in part, and that is what I was doing when I used the word boyfriend.
    • I trust Becky.  In fact, she knows exactly how to hurt me, and I’m entrusting her not to do that.
• After writing the article yesterday and going running yesterday, I don’t feel like I’m going off the deep end nearly as much, but I think it might still be a good idea to find a counselor, mostly because I do not want to delay getting help and getting past this as a delay could increase the risk of our relationship getting into trouble and its that trouble I want to talk about today just a bit (have to keep this short and get back to work.)  One of my tricks here is that we know lots of people in the medical profession and I’d prefer to find someone that will not show up in our social circles.  (just a comfort thing)

Fear of Losing My Wife Due to Failure to Make Her Happy

I don’t really fear that I will lose my wife to another guy because of something he has that I lack.  I don’t necessarily feel that the friend in question is better looking or anything (not saying he’s ugly, but I’m not a good judge of guys looks.  Apparently, he’s a little shorter than I am (never noticed) and is probably a dozen years older.  This isn’t really about the ‘other guy’.

Its about what I have done wrong or failed to do right.

Not to toot my own horn (If I wanted to do that, I’d probably still be single), but I think I’m a relatively decent guy, a good husband and a good father.  I base my example on many of the other people I have known to fill that role.

I’m not perfect, and over time I think some of my imperfections have amplified as I get set in my ways a bit, and just get older in general.  I’m 37, even though some people think I’m younger.  I’ve been working full time for 20 years and part time in a family business for years before that.  Work is a key part of my make up, and also one of my faults.  I do work too much, but I’m getting better at it than I ever used to be.

I work from home primarily these days, which makes me ‘available’ significantly more than it ever did in the past.  The chief issue with working at home is one of ‘presence’.  I am at home when the kids leave for school and get home at night.  I’m at home for dinner most nights and all week long.  Due to the nature of working at home and trying to find quiet time to work and focus, that keeps me up late (after the kids go to bed working).  I fill in the quiet moments of the day with work, and try and be present when they are home.

That’s a huge improvement over the days when I worked in corporate America or worked full time and went to school full time both with and without children.

But work is distracting me from my family at times and vice versa.  Last week, I essentially worked 3 days, mostly because of this particular issue and the extra curricular activities with my wife on Thursday (New Moon midnight showing, shopping) and Friday ‘The date’ (still looking for a better description for that event).  I’m healing but not healed.

Becky seems to believe that I am

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