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!

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.

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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That’s an unfair headline, but I’m going with it for now until I think of something more appropriate.  Regardless, I am basically recovering from the date Friday night when I went out with my wife and her ‘boy friend’.

I wrote about this before hand a few days back

Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend

Now, before I go any further, I need to say some things up front.  This site is called There’s Something about Harry.  I’m Harry, its a play on my middle name.  I started this site almost 4 years ago and the site has no purpose.  If you are reading this, all you are going to get is a little insight into my thoughts, a snapshot in time of my mind.

Years back, I created the site to practice some things with html and css.  Then soon after I used it to break writers block, going through a number of silly exercises to get my creative juices flowing.  Back then I was working as a new blogger, a ghost writer and a business developer.

Anyway, this site never had a purpose other than to be a support for me.  That is something that I appreciate a great deal more the last few days, as my site has turned into my therapist.

Time for Therapy

Deep Breathe, ok one more of those, Deep Breath

So after I wrote that last article a few things happened.  I wrote that article Thursday afternoon.  I was pretty sure I was not going to go out with my wife who had been invited by a guy she met on our anniversary when we went out to celebrate 16 years of marriage.  She’s a flirt in a physical way, and he flirted back heavily.

They exchanged contact information and developed a ‘friendship’ in the days and weeks that followed.  I didn’t know about the friendship until sometime around Tuesday night, which was about 3 weeks after the fact give or take a few days.

We had plans to go and see the New Moon premier after midnight Thursday night, Becky and a friend from work (female) and her friend/old boyfriend.

I wasn’t super thrilled about seeing the premier, but that was mostly because I’m not crazy about the twilight movies.  They are a little too teenage focused for me.

Twilight Series Spoiler alert

The books are fine enough, even though I get a little annoyed that

1. Edward takes too long to figure out that he should turn Bella into a vampire (3 books) sorry about the spoiler . .
2. Edward, a 109 year old male, doesn’t realize that he is capable of producing sperm, and that a girl could get pregnant from sperm

End of spoiler

But my wife loves the series, the books, the movies, the sound tracks, pretty much the whole works and she reads a lot of vampire books and series now as a result.

So we went, and I had a good time.  We stopped by a bar on the way.  I had two killian’s red beers before the movie and I enjoyed it.  The movie complex ran the movie in 9 different theaters and the place was packed.  The movie wasn’t quite as teeny bopper focused as Twilight.  The special effects were alright (the werewolves in the early scenes were a little goofy).  The romeo and juliet vibe between bella and edward is realized in a campy romantic way, and Jacob’s ability to steal a scene really showed its teeth in New Moon.  I almost got the sense that whenever there was a scene with Edward, the movie was going down hill and whenever a scene with Jacob showed up things were better.  But from an artistic perspective that’s kind of the point of the second book and probably done intentionally in the movie too.

Throughout the night, I made a couple joking comments via twitter, and all in all it was a decent night,but . . . I was dreading Friday night and the DATE.

To make things more complex, my wife was awaiting the results of her National Boards.  They were due sometime on Friday.  So the night out at How at the Moon in Charlotte, took on a new importance.  It was either going to be a celebration or a consolation for my wife depending on if she passed her boards or not.  She completed them last spring and it takes the board something like 6 months to tally up scores.  Rather ridiculous if you ask me, and I know a thing or two about board processes.  If you haven’t been through a medical board, or a military board, or an educational board, you might liken it to something like a CPA exam or sitting for the Bar exam.

Friday, we woke up late after being up late.  We got the kids on the bus for school and Becky dropped our youngest off at school.

Sometime in the mid morning she got her results back, and she did not pass all of her boards.  So she now has to redo/retake some of these.  This is a grueling process and a shit load of work.  Not to mention she (we) had to pay $4k out of pocket last year for her to take them.  Now we will have to pay another $1k to retest, and finances have not been great this year, nor last year.  We’re going to do it, but its not going to be easy.

She was pretty upset, and despite all of my issues with the DATE, I did everything I could to make her feel better.  We went out to eat, and went shopping at Kohls for something for her to wear to the DATE that night, then we went around to two of the schools picking up our daughters.

Got home, she took a nap and I picked up our son.

Sometime after that I think I wrote that article above.

She might have had another nap as well.  Stress and being out late, and me hemming and hawing about whether I would go or not, mostly me leaning towards not going at all, or possibly driving her there, dropping her off and picking her up after she was done and ready to leave so that she had a safe trip to and from without any cabs or opportunity to go home with her boyfriend. (I didn’t think that latter aspect was likely, but well, we’re all human.)

We did talk about things throughout the day a bit.  It was helping (me) to talk about it, but I didn’t get a chance to really express my feelings until I wrote the blog article.  When I did write it, that was my subjective perspective.  I’m not an objective writer, by choice.  I can write objectively with the best of them, but I see little value in objectivity, something I won’t go into in this article because it doesn’t relate.

People, friends and family, kept asking me if I was going and wishing me a good time.  I kept telling them, I’m not sure if I’m going or not.  They didn’t understand.  Got a lot of weird looks that day, but they didn’t know about my wife’s friend nor did they have the visuals of him groping her stuck in their head.

Ultimately, towards the last minute, I decided to go.  I had a lot of reasons for this, but primarily I wanted to BE THERE, I wanted to present myself as a candidate for my wife’s attentions.  I didn’t feel like this was fair, we’re married.  Now, I don’t believe in marriage for a lot of reasons, never have, never will (new fodder for the fire in this).  But for those that do believe in marriage (sorry about that flawed condition if you have it) people tend to think that if you are married you should not fall for someone else, you shouldn’t flirt with someone else, you shouldn’t make your spouse/significant other jealous, yada yada yada.

That’s all bullshit.  People are humans and we aren’t wired that way.  I know that, appreciate it, and live aware of it.  I don’t embrace the fact in a free love kind of way popular in the 60’s, but I know that things can happen.  That emotions and feelings can develop.

I mentioned in the article that I did not want to lose Becky.  I love Becky.  I didn’t want to compete for her, because that goes against my nature, against the few beliefs I have, but that night I chose to at least be there.

She needed my support for the boards, she needed a designated driver, and any other time, I would have loved to go and have a good time.

Before we left I had a shot of seagrams.  Becky drove, we picked up her girl friend and we headed to Charlotte.  I had a couple more beers before switching to diet coke and sobering up.  I just couldn’t face the night with the edge that was present in my head.  Plus, its a fucking dueling paino bar.  You almost can’t go there and deal with the place on a normal night without some alcohol. (The performers are good, and funny, but alcohol is part of the experience.)

We arrived and joined the table that the boyfriend had won, driving the invitation and my purpose as the DD.  He was sitting with another couple, some friends, 1 of which he worked with I think.  It was their first time at a piano bar, and I don’t think they were really into it(they were drinking, but probably not enough).  I couldn’t really make much contact with the boyfriend.  I figured if I did, I’d probably end up doing something I would regret.  That might have ranged anywhere from cracking a bunch of jokes, insulting him out right, belittling him in front of a crowd, throwing stuff, taking a cheap shot at him with my fist, starting a full blown fight, getting pissed at my wife and storming out, ditching her there, or who knows what else.

So I basically watched the band and sang along.  I put on a good face and held it together pretty well.

On the drive there, I got a tweet from someone that commented about the fact that I had mentioned in a tweet that I was heading out with my wife so she could be with her boyfriend.

@capitalfellow

@brettbum sounds more emasculating than dumb. #goodluckwiththat

I think he was responding to one of these messages, but I’m not sure which:

Some people would read that and feel a little embarrassed, others might even feel like it was a little insulting or described them as being less than . . . .something.

For me it actually kicked off a little bit of courage.  I’ve never bought into the whole masculinity crap.  I don’t fret about my masculinity.  I’m actually extremely confident in myself and don’t have to live up to some goofy stereotype. (like driving your wife to a date with her boyfriend is bad apparently).

OK, I need to set something a little straight.  I’m referring to the guy as boyfriend and the event as a date.  But in fairness, that is more me writing.  When I write, especially about my life, there are a lot of odd things that have happened to me over the years.  For example, I had a run in with organized criminals in china that were knocking off Motorola 2 way radios and selling them on the black market, these ended up as key parts used for IEDs in Iraq.  I became a whistleblower, they threatened to kill me.  My life is not uneventful.

To deal with shit like that (and this) I have to use words that help me summarize the experience in terms that others will understand quickly, otherwise, I’ll write or say 10,000 words explaining a fine point.  So when I call it a date, she wasn’t going out on a date just to be with this guy, but that’s the easiest way I can convey the event and the emotions in my head that I experienced then when I thought about the event.

My wife is not a bad person.  I don’t think she has cheated on me.  I don’t think she intended to hurt me.  ( I was hurt, but I don’t think the intent was there.) And she did need to go out and have a good time that night to lick her wounds from the results of the boards.

Anyway, for now, I’m going to keep referring to things this way.  I have to partly for my own peace of mind to help exorcise the daemons in my head.  I have to say the words enough so that they won’t have any power of me or my emotions any more, because right now they are tearing me up inside.

So anyway the comment actually helped me remember who I was a bit, and remember more importantly where I came from and how I came to be, and that gave me some strength to put it into perspective and when I got there, I didn’t just drop Becky off and come back later.  I went in and stayed until we left later, together.

Now, while we were there things weren’t all perfect.  I was having a mostly good time for the first few hours as long as I didn’t look the wrong way.  I opened up a tab, Becky and her friend had a shot, bought by a third couple that joined us late.

We sent in a lot of song requests, including one from me, Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum.  That song has a lot of history for me and symbolizes the energy I need to get through very very difficult personal situations.  I’ve turned to it in times of need many times over the years.  I haven’t had need of it in a few years.

I gave $5 to get that one played, normally I give $2 or $3.  The piano player saw it and gave me a look, like fat chance.  (they didn’t play Every day is Halloween, on Halloween when we were there for our anniversary), so I figured that I just lost $5.

But much later that evening they played it.  That helped quite a bit, but before we got there, I was writing up a later song request, when the other piano player turned the spot light on me (we were at a table close to the stage) and said that he’d have to get me up on stage because I was not singing along to the current song (I wasn’t even paying attention because I was writing a song request).  He made some joke about me being ‘too cool for school’ and the blazer I was wearing and told me to get my Nicholas Cage ass up on the stage.
I went and had to sing the chorus of Chuck Berry’s “My Ding Aling” in front of an audience, including my wife’s boyfriend.

I was a good sport, but holding that microphone at that point in time was a dangerous thing.  I was having a hard time singing, not because I was embarrassed about the song, but because, I thought about ripping into the boyfriend with the mic or explaining to the audience the situation that had brought me up on stage to be the subject of a ridiculous song.  I also thought about throwing the microphone at the guy, but doubted my aim given my high level of fury.  That and the spotlights in my eyes were messing with me a bit.

So I kind of sang, in a William “Bubba” Shatner kind of way.

That was not my last time on stage singing that night.

the next time was more comfortable for strange reasons.

The night went on, Becky had a great time, danced quite a bit (with the crowd of other women that were dancing in front of and on the stage).  She was having a good time, and I was happy for her.

Later that night, they brought a guy up on stage.  He’d just gotten back from Africa or Iraq (not sure which) where he had been serving with the military.  I think his first name was Jerry.  For some reason I got a feeling he was a Doctor, just had that look.  Before you know it they were calling out to have all veterans come up on stage.

I’m a veteran, I joined the army when the US was building up on the Kuwait border in the fall of 1990.  I started Basic, the day the war started.  I served during but not in the first Persian Gulf War.  I later supported the mission to Somalia and Haiti, I worked the Balkans desk in the early 90’s but never deployed.  I see myself as a veteran, but I see a big difference in veterans that have been deployed to a foreign country to fight and those that haven’t.  Normally, I don’t stand up for recognition during these types of things, but this time with the encouragement of Becky I found myself heading up on stage, where my Nicolas Cage ass joined with other veterans to sing Proud to be an American, a country song (not terribly fond of country music) which I learned to sing along to and drink copious amounts of beer when I was in the Army stationed in Texas years ago.

That felt better than singing My Ding aling in front of my wife’s boy friend.

As the night went on, I mostly held in there.  My wife sat across from me the entire night pretty much.  One of her beefs with me is that I don’t flirt with her in public, I don’t hang on her, tickle her, kiss/fondle her stuff like that.  Its mostly true.  Its not her, its me.  I try but it just doesn’t manifest, which is one of the things that drove her to flirt with the other guy weeks earlier, and knowing that I don’t give her what she wants in this way, I didn’t mind, then.

But I couldn’t quite do it Friday night either.  I was trying to keep a level head and not do something that would make me look like a complete asshole and might increase my wife’s sympathy for the other guy, like ridiculing him on stage, or throwing a beer bottle at his head.

Towards the end of the night, most of the people from our table’s party had left, including a woman that had come to be something of an almost date with my wife’s boyfriend.  She was uncomfortable all night long, I think they are mismatched, and that’s just me being honest.  Some strange lady at the bar that night even tried to set this girl up with her brother at a different table, taking her away from my wife’s boyfriend and his chances of possibly connecting with someone else (besides my wife).

I seriously felt bad for the guy for the way she was treating him.  I don’t dislike this guy (for the most part).  I see my issues or complaints here as a problem in my own head.  A personal emotional weakness that I didn’t know I had, or something new that has developed over 16 years of a ‘safe’ marriage relationship.

However, she eventually left kind of early, after playing text messaging games most of the night.  She did finally start to sing along after a couple Blue Moon beers at the very end for 20-30 minutes.

But when she left, the boyfriend was at one end of the group of tables separated by the rest of us by at least one chair.  My wife eventually moved chairs on the opposite side of the tables and sat next to him.  She was trying to flirt

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OK, I need to whine, bitch, moan and complain a little bit.  Please don’t read anything more into this than my airing my complaints, because that is all it is.  Sometimes you just need to exorcise the deamons from your head a bit and that’s what I’m doing right now. 

I would have done this yesterday, but I’ve been having server problems (one of the things I’m complaining about) so I couldn’t even blog about my troubles.

My week hasn’t exactly gone as planned this week.  It started on Monday.

I had outlined a number of video scripts that I needed to record this week for a new set of tutorials for designing wordpress themes that I have been working on for a while now.  I’ve been to a bunch of conferences now where I have given a bit of the intro (101 level) presentation on how to design a wordpress theme from scratch with no prior experience.

Its a great presentation, and I’ve helped a lot of people learn something useful, something they wanted to learn, and something that can make them money.

I always like teaching people how to fish. . . . well not so much fishing but teaching them how to make money so they can buy fish.

If you want me to speak at a conference, camp, or event that you are hosting, please get in touch with me through my company site at Softduit or via twitter, email, linkedin etc.  I’m not too hard to find, just google Brett Bumeter.

Complaint 1 – Noisy Neighbor

So I need to complain about my neighbor.  he’s a great guy, getting ready to take his band on tour in europe, and he’s been recovering from a house fire for the last year.  I’m not mad at him and don’t fault him for this, but it proved to be a problem for me this week. 

He’s had construction workers at his house all year since his house caught fire.  Tragic story(no one injured), and I feel for him, but this last Monday as he was finally moving back in, the construction workers were making a lot of noise and I couldn’t record my video and audio work.

Tuesday, I spent scoping out a coworking space in Charlotte, which I will probably sign up for just as soon as I get the membership agreement, which is a couple days late coming to me now, but no worries.  Seems like a good deal, and I’m looking forward to it.  I think I will scope out office space in Savannah next, but that’s another story.

Tuesday night I get home after perusing the new office and then hanging around for a tweetup afterwards.  My wife is in bed chatting on the computer with her boyfriend.  She met him on our 16th anniversary at Howl at the Moon in Charlotte when we went out to celebrate.

I’m not a jealous guy by a mile and a half, and didn’t mind when he flirted with her nor even when he started groping her.  She was enjoying the attention and having a good time.  Together we had a great time that night.  It was Halloween and just a fun night all in all.

But I wasn’t exactly expecting her to hit it off with the guy on a long term basis either.

Its about 3 weeks later and she talks with him regularly via chat and stuff.  I’m not real nosy, but I think she talks with him via email, messenger and she’s friends with him on Facebook.

He’s got my business card, so who knows maybe Mike’s even reading my this article right now.

Hi Mike

Anyway, I don’t mind my wife flirting with people.  Never have.  I kind of look at it from the perspective that I’m a relatively nice guy, decent husband, decent father, I don’t smoke, do drugs, beat anyone, haven’t been to jail etc.  Sex life is good, not too kinked up not too boring.  I want Becky to be happy, so if someday she decides that I’m not the guy anymore, well I want her to be happy and find the person that is the right person.

I’m not trying to push her away, don’t want to lose her, but I’m not going to stifle her either nor entrap her in a marriage just because.  I don’t see that as a good option for anyone.

So if she wants to chat with some guy she met at a club every day, well whatever.

If she wanted to go have an affair with the guy, I probably wouldn’t stop her there either.  I’d hope that she would come back, maybe sew some oats or something (its been 16 years, if she’s bored or needs something I’m not providing well I want her to be happy).  But I’d do that HOPING she would come back.

Maybe I’m vain to think that the grass IS greener on this side of the fence, but well, I do.  Always have, and if she doesn’t think so, she needs to tell me or find better pastures. ( again not trying to send her away).

But the flirting/groping turned what she calls a new friend type of relationship grates on my nerves a bit.

Complaint 2 – My Wife’s New Long Term Boy Friend

I look at it from the perspective that he met her with sex on the brain.  Drunken, flirty, groping situation and it definitely was not absent from their thoughts.  I don’t know how seriously she entertained the idea with having sex with him.  She speculated that he might be more interested in having sex with me.

I used to get that a lot from guys, ergo they wanting to have sex with me, but I’ve never found that right guy, and odds are I’m not going to.  I’m not looking and never have been.  I’m pretty much straight as an arrow, despite my propensity for disco.

Drunkenly, that night I lightly toyed with the notion of the three of us having a thing.  I don’t think my wife has ever slept with two guys at the same time, maybe she’d like that.  I don’t know.  If she asked, I’d probably oblige as long as I didn’t have to touch the other dude too much, preferably not at all. 

I don’t know if the other guy looks good or not, can’t judge guys looks, never really could.  I’d include his facebook picture or something, but don’t think that would be really fair.  I’m not complaining to harass him nor my wife, just need to air my thoughts and don’t really have someone that I can talk about this with on the phone or in person.

So I’m publishing it, I’m sure that’s a bad idea, but trying to salvage my sanity first.

So anyway, her talking with him via chat and email and stuff wouldn’t be probably all that annoying.  Its 2009, conversations online happen.  But this is where my complaint comes in . . .

He invited her to go back to Howl at the Moon this Friday, and bring me and some friends of hers.

So my complaint is that, I don’t really care if she talks with him, don’t care even if she sleeps with him (says she hasn’t and is not going to probably), but I don’t necessarily want to be there when he courts her, attempts to woo her away, and she asked me to go with following her invitation so that I could be the designated driver!

That last part kind of hits the nail on the head.  Not only does she want me to go out with her so she can be with her boy friend . . .

She calls him a close friend now because she has counseled him online in regards to some girl he’s been infatuated with for a long time and is finally going out with this Friday night, which to me sounds a bit like my wife in code or something.

. . . . so not only go out with her so she can be with her boyfriend and he can see my wife, but she wants me to drive so she can get drunk with him, and I can take her safely home.

I do want to see her get home safe.  For all I know this guy is a serial killer or something, and it is a long long way for a cab drive from Charlotte.

Add in to the mix she wants to take her friends from work with her, so not only will I be out with my wife and her boyfriend while they get drunk at the club they met at on our anniversary, but her friends will get to drink and wonder why I’m there letting my wife get drunk with her boyfriend at a club where they met on our anniversary. 

just a touch of public humiliation thrown in on top of letting my wife go on a date basically.

Well, it was until this week that I finally found a context to that Meat Loaf song that I have always hated and still do.

“I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”

I guess this is my thing that I just won’t do.  She’s upset because I don’t want to go.  She had fun the last time we went (mentioned that above) and says she wants to go and have fun with me there.

In her defense, I’m not great at public displays of affection.  Never have been, just not in my wiring, which is part of the reason I didn’t mind other guys (there were a couple others that night) showering attention on her.  I think its healthy for people to be adored a bit every now and then.  Furthermore, (feels weird to write a paragraph with furthermore in it about this topic, not really trying to make a federal case out of this ) I travel quite a bit these days for work.  I have to socialize and go to a lot of those cheesy social media parties in crazy places like Vegas.

I know that is not easy for her to cope with.  I’m not much of a flirt these days.  I used to be when I was single, but I got so tired of the games of flirting and picking people up . . . .well it was one of the reasons why I got married.  And that relates to my wife, because she didn’t play those games when we met or dated.  It was refreshing then.  Maybe more importantly, I don’t grope girls at the parties I go to, ask anyone (this is the internet and I’m sure there are lots of pictures and maybe video) its just not my style.  Anyway, my point is that I’m away a lot, meeting lots of people, men and women, and she doesn’t see that which is not easy for her.

One of the differences here is that I DID see her meet this guy, flirt with him and get groped for a couple hours.  So its difficult for me to now envision the two of them ‘just as friends’.  Its been a long time since I did grope someone other than Becky, and I can only think of one girl I groped that I didn’t have sex with (I was 17).  We are still very distant friends on facebook, but I have seen her since I was 17, and the odds of her inviting me to go out and party and then asking my wife to come along as the designated driver are just not going to happen.

So Wednesday morning, I woke up after watching my wife chat with this guy the night before and her receiving the invitation and then emailing it to me.  I had this hollow feeling in my gut from the minute I woke up.

I didn’t really think I’d lose her, but weirder things do happen to people.  I sure as hell didn’t want to contribute to losing her just because I lack that healthy dose of jealousy gene that most people have.

I couldn’t work at all that morning, ended up going back to bed for a couple hours, but could barely sleep, even though I hadn’t got much sleep the night before or all week for that matter.

Woke up that afternoon and tried to get it together for a customer meeting online, and just couldn’t do it.  Backed out of that meeting with a poor ‘DSL down excuse’ but how do you tell a customer you can meet with them because you are torn up over your wife’s boyfriend?

By the way, if you don’t know this about me by now, I should lay it out for you as I AM aware of it.  I have a tendency to be a little overly dramatic.  While I’m not exaggerating the events, I HOPE I am seeing something possible where HOPEFULLY nothing is possible.

My wife got home from work and I told her I didn’t want to go and wouldn’t likely go.  I told her if she wanted I would drive her, drop her off and pick her up.

I do want her to be safe, and seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if this guy was a serial killer (we do seem to have one in Gastonia these days, again, 2nd girl’s body was just found, although I suspect it was drug related).

So I’d go so far as to take her and bring her home to make sure she is safe, but I don’t want to be there and watch, nor be in the situation, nor walk away with a re-enforced memory, good bad or otherwise.  I just want to do a memory dump on this situation basically.

I’m not demanding she stop emailing/chatting/facebook friend him or anything either.  If they are friends, great.  Whatever.  But I don’t want to be a part of possibly creating a situation where they have a greater chance to connect or something. 

IF there is a spark there, I’m not going to blow on it.

Hell, I’ve already agreed to go see New Moon with her tonight after midnight.  She’s a big fan of that book series and movies, over the top type of fan.  I think the books are decent enough, but the movies seem a little too teenage for my tastes.

So going to New Moon tonight and then out with her boyfriend tomorrow night is just too much.  I keep thinking maybe I could just let it go and go and have fun, but that’s the thing.  Given the situation, I don’t think I can have fun, even if I go and drink myself silly.  I don’t want to go somewhere, knowing the odds are good that I’ll sit there and sulk and be a brooding asshole, nice contrast to her new boyfriend who will likely be in a better mood. 

Seems likes like a recipe for disaster if not Jerry Springer.

Then on top of all of that, last night as I’m finally trying to get back on track and get caught up with the work that I was too depressed to deal with yesterday, my server crashes last night around 1 am.

Complaint 3 – My Server went down again

My server with inmotion hosting has been driving me nuts since July.  I’ve been with them for almost 4 years and have historically loved their service and support.

In July, they convinced me to upgrade from one server to a newer ‘faster’ server.  I’ve had nothing but problems ever since.  Almost everyother week, my server goes down and they threaten to cancel my prepaid account ($500 per year) because I’m using up to much CPU time.

I have a handful of sites that get very little traffic.  I have actually closed or moved half the accounts I had on my server before July because of this.

The server crash, completely torpedoed the last of my energy last night, so I went to bed hoping that it would be better enough in the morning.  Scrunched up in bed and tried to sleep, barely pulled that off.

Got up around 6:50 and the server is still down.  Got my daughter on her bus and then called tech support.  I got the impression they were just starting to look into it 6 hours later (I could be mistaken, but that was the impression the phone rep gave me who was interfacing with the higher level support reps, who used to field phone calls and now do not).

I’ve been through this with them before.  I figured, I can’t fix things with my wife right away, but maybe I can fix my fucking server at least.  So I started seriously looking into switching to Host Gator, which I’ve been scoping since this problem came up.

I’ve done a massive amount of optimization for performance on my sites over the last 5 months, and I had no issue  before the server upgrade.  I’m pretty sure its not me, its them, but their system provides almost no information about what is going on with my accounts on their server.

I’m completely in the dark with them. 

I had one last talk with them, indicated that I was going to move elsewhere and started to work on that.

Then I get a call from Marco at Inmotion.  He was doing some super heavy lifting on my server trying to reconfigure it and move my sites to a different machine where we could figure out what was going on.  His super hero efforts stopped me from switching, but I’m not sure if that’s good for either one of us just yet.

Many hours later, I think my sites are actually back up and working without the errors and things.  They’ve been up and down all after noon as he works his magic.

When I started writing this blog post 90 minutes ago, Something About Harry was still up.  Hopefully it still is because I’m getting ready to hit the publish button.  I feel better and I’m tired of bitching.

If you read this far, thanks for listening.  I have a lot of good luck and a tendency for surviving very odd situations, usually to my benefit.  I hope these complaints and the situations that caused them have a positive outcome.

Hey everyone, I’ve been a little faded on this blog for the last month.  Frankly, the month has been a complete bear! (no excuse).  I need to catch up on a whole slew of things, and rather than publish 5 or 6 blog articles all at once, I’m going to roll them all together in one big fat medley of blogging fun that I used to call house cleaning or a chore when I was a kid.

Guess that’s maybe the wrong word as I don’t typically see or think of blogging as a chore.  But after the last month, its been difficult to stay focused on blogging.  It kind of started right after Affiliate Summit in early August.  I got back home, slept all night, woke up and found out that my twitter account was suspended ( @brettbum ).

Disclosure: I did use the new SponsoredTweets system around this time, but do not feel that it was the reason behind the suspension.  I only made 2 tweets with it (I don’t really get any offers on the system or I would use it more.  Probably doesn’t have anything to do with this article that I wrote either Social Media Douche Bags Agree, Its Cool to ‘Say’ Sponsored Tweets Suck – White Paper

Now, in general, I’m more of a Facebook person than a twitter person.  Facebook just suits me better for relationships with people.  Twitter is good for a number of things imho, especially conferences or events, but I’m a reluctant twitter person.  It probably comes across in my tweets a bit.

Anyway, it wasn’t the end of the world when my twitter account was suspended, just very annoying, mostly because it was suspended for NO REASON.  Its back up now after a full review, and I’ve never been told why it was suspended in the first place.

Whatever, sometimes the fail whale shows up on your screen and sometimes the fail whale comes up underneath of you, bites you on the ass and flips you around like a seal.

Did I mention I’m going to SeaWorld next month?

So I got my twitter account back up after it was down for almost two weeks.  I had to setup a new twitter account in the meant time @brettbumeter which was a nice additional account that I don’t really need.

But this isn’t about how stupid twitter can be.  The point is that this was kind of the beginning of my bad / goofy month. (Rant Continues)

I also started having issues with my VPS (virtual private server).  I pay about $50 per month for a virtually dedicated amount of server space.  I have about 39 websites on this server, 30 of them are mine, and the others are friends, family and a couple clients that have very small websites on my server as well.

Well, the damn thing was upgraded from an old machine to a new one in July, and since then the CPU has been running super super super hot.  My host, InmotionHosting whom I normally love, can’t give me any details as to what is causing it and keep telling me that I need to switch to a $200 per month plan. 

Can’t Afford it

Now, I know quite a bit about optimizing sites for server performance.  I’ve been up one side and down the other on my sites improving everything under the sun, robots.txt, cache plugins, db cache plugikns, widget cache plugins, and much much more, but the thing still runs hot, and my traffic is not substantial (if it were, then I could afford the upgrade).

What does a hot CPU have to do with a hill of beans, IzeaFest or Michael Jackson for that matter?

I’m getting there.  For those of you that know me, I’m not typically shy with words, nor do I use 2 words when 200 are readily available.

The thing is all this futzing with re-optimizing 39 sites has been a serious time distraction, typically when I don’t have any time.

Add to that, my friends at Bank of America, some of the nicest people to talk to on the phone when they are proceeding to bury your ass in the ground, decided that I would be much happier and financially stable if they raised my credit card rates (for no reason) from 5% to 30%.

Can’t Afford it

Now all year long, my business has been growing like crazy and I’ve been keeping up with Bank of America, but then August hit.  In August several of my regular customers experienced financial problems with their customers and the fire hose of income that I had been receiving turned into a trickle down effect of pennies.

So through August, I’ve been scrambling to find new/additional customers.  Looking back from September, I’ve done pretty well, but it takes time to find a new customer and turn them into a paying customer, and I’m just getting to that last part.

Along the way, I almost worked out a job with the Las Vegas Hilton.  Thought it had some good potential, and then the Hilton just never responded.    That was unfortunate both financially, but because I could have helped them a great deal, and now I’m watching them continue to struggle.

Been There Seen That Before

I have wrapped up a couple nice projects for friends of mine that I met at the Podcast Expo and later BlogWorlds.

We have the upgrade and consolidation of sites for Mike McAllen’s events and media company just about finished over at Grass Shack Events & Media.

Similarly, Paolo & Francesca Tosolini hired me to upgrade Francesca’s Interior Design Website at CreatingInteriors.com.

I really liked the way both projects turned out.  Both websites received some serious functional improvements and great design improvements as well. 

From a business perspective however, these were July projects and as things went, some of the back and forth exchanges of information necessary to complete the projects delayed them a bit (mostly vacation and travel situations between everyone involved).

So going into August, the projects were just being finished, and I couldn’t hold them up as shiny new examples of my work either to help land new projects. 

And don’t forget while I’m working on these projects my hosting company goes into fits every other week….

And the last IzeaFest Ticket Winner IS…..

That brings me to IzeaFest.  I ran a contest give away my last IzeaFest Ticket. The drawing was scheduled for September 3, but I’m just doing it now.  The entrance options were shut down on the third.  I’ve been backlogged as I chase down problems, respond to Bank of America which wants to bury me, and trying to chase down new business so that I can keep myself out of a Bank of America coffin.

Its no excuse for being late, but sometimes life happens.  It did for me, and well here is the winner !

The winner of the Final #Izeafest ticket is . . . . . . . Rob Babiak @pbandsdad www.lookwhatmomfound.com Congrats Rob!

Rob really went the extra mile in entering this contest.  He tweeted, he blogged, he asked questions, he even designed a WordPress Theme from scratch to earn 100 Entries in the contest and 1 of those entries from the Theme batch of 100, earned him the prize!

Rob already won a ticket, so we are re-running the drawing with existing entries – stay posted for a few minutes . .

Toni Snearly is the Follow Up Winner of the last IzeaFest Ticket!

You can follow Toni @ItsToni or read her blog at Cheapomcfrugalpants.com.

I’m moderating the Advertising Panel for What an Advertiser Wants at IzeaFest.  As I write this, I need to get a pre-interview questionaire out to the other advertisers, then set up a conference call with them so that we can kind of meet and greet on the phone.  I’ve reached out to them a few months back already, but only got a couple responses then.  So need to lock things down before the big event in October.  In reality, I’ve been preparing for this for a year already, Just need to put the finishing touches on it.

I actually prepaid for my own trip to IzeaFest back in March.  Its a good damned thing I did that too, because right now, I don’t have the spare money to travel thanks to BoA.  They felt that I could pay my bills and debt easier if they charged me an extra $1000 per month in interest, instead of paying down principle with that $1k or investing it in my business to grow the business, earn more and then pay them.

BoA is not my favorite group of people right now.  Its not all their fault by a long shot, but it is largely their fault.

WordCamp Birmingham A week from Today

Next Friday, I’m travelling(6 hour drive)  to Birmingham for the second time in my life to attend WordCamp Birmingham for the second time in my life. 

It was a great event last year with about 120 people.  They have over double that this year and will probably hit 250 – 300 people before they cap it off this coming Tuesday. If you haven’t registered, do so now.  They shut down registration on Tuesday to make sure that the t-shirt orders and meals will get ordered for the right number of people.

I’m speaking at this event again, but this year I’m covering how to get started in WordPress Theme Design.  I’ve been doing this all summer at a number of events including the Raleigh Durham WordCamp and Barcamp Chattanooga.  I’ve got a speaking request in for Las Vegas WordCamp at BlogWorld, but I hear that Jim and Rick at Blogworld are making the speaker decisions, and for whatever reason they never return my calls even though I’ve sent them lots of new business over the last couple years.  I don’t get that, but assume they are busy or something, too busy to respond.  They are always very enthusiastic and friendly when ever I see them at events, but as soon as the events are over, the wall of silence goes up. 

Save 20% NOW on BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2009 registration with the code "BWESEP20"

Guess that’s social media for you. 

Everyone is happy to exchange asinine 140 character messages back and forth with you, but try and have a real conversation (even when you are sending them money) and nothing, they don’t have time to much tweeting to do, or something.  I’m not singling out the Blogworld guys on this, it seems to be happening everywhere.  And hay, guess what, I’m behind on crap too!

Holy Shit Just Got an Amazing Comment on one of My Articles!

No idea what I was just talking about, but I just got an email notification about a comment on one of my articles (Michael Jackson segue (pronounced segway never wrote that word before)).

Here’s the quote

Deb, I can assure you, the songs are not trash. It was always policy at Motown to record a multitude of songs on any given artist. Just because these songs didn’t see the light of day back then has nothing to do with the quality of the material. One song I have listened to is an out and out SMASH.

WOW!

You may have no idea what that comment is about, so I’ll fill you in.  It was made by Russ Terrana.  Russ worked for Motown for over 20 years and was the recording engineer/mixer for everyone from Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Isaac Hayes, even Whitney Houston (different label) and much much more.

He’s mixed 37 platinum albums, 89 number 1 hits and over 300 songs that hit the top 100 billboard charts.

What the Hell is he Talking About?

Russ is talking about the LOST MICHAEL JACKSON SONGS DISCOVERED IN THE MOTOWN VAULTS OWNED BY UNIVERSAL.

Russ is mixing down these lost tapes and UMG (universal music group) is going to release these long lost songs in November.

NO ONE has ever heard these songs outside of the people that were in the studios with Michael Jackson back in the seventies! 

If Russ says there is a SMASH hit, There’s going to be a SMASH Michael Jackson Hit!

Guess what, you are reading it from the source and getting it from me first, because my friend Joe Klein and I broke this story.  Joe’s been friends with Russ for years and years and years.

So that kind of gets me around to the writing I’ve been doing the last couple weeks.  We published this great story Monday, but it has been buried in Google News a bit because of the Kanye West Jackass thing on the VMA’s.  Everyone is talking about Kanye West acting the ass, and they’ve missed the story about the discovery of NEW MICHAEL JACKSON HITS coming out in November. 

Guess that’s social media for you. 

That’s the thing about Social Media, it gets the buzz out about what the crowd is talking about, but if the crowd is talking about stupid shit, then the crowd misses the important or interesting stuff.

Is it OK to Blog About This?

That circles back actually to the last thing I wanted to talk about.  When we started looking at this Michael Jackson story, my friend Joe asked his friend Russ if it would be OK to blog about this project that Russ was working on, Mixing the original master recordings of Michael Jackson songs for a future release (imagine finding high quality lost recordings from Elvis at his prime 3 months after his death that had never been released!)

Now, Russ said yes, and Joe asked him again a couple more times.  Just wanted to make sure, because Russ and Joe are friends and the last thing Joe wanted to do was blog about something and maybe get Russ into a bad spot.

All seemed cool, but then we started hearing yesterday (4 days after the article was out in the world and on Google News) that UMG might not be so happy.  So we had some follow up articles that we were going to publish yesterday that we are now sitting on.

As a blogger, people usually just publish every damned thing and worry about the consequences later.  Maybe Joe and I are bad bloggers, but we didn’t want to do that type of thing.  Its no good screwing over a friend just to get some extra attention for your blog, even if that extra attention drives your traffic through the roof and maybe helps your profile increase so that you can earn a little more and fend off the Bank of America Nazi’s sending you robo-collection-calls (what’s up with that anyway?  I was a credit manager for years, and the idea of using robo calls for collections is the dumbest thing I’ve experienced this month, not counting the contractors that showed up at 1 am to work on my neighbors floor).

So if you are thinking about dropping a bombshell of an article, think twice about the collateral damage that might shake out.  We took every precaution, and even then there was some second guessing.  If I were TMZ (talked to them recently) or Matt Drudge (old school), the model would be to drop this story and damn the consequences.  But that’s not my style, and maybe that will improve my karma or maybe it will kill my credit, but at least I will sleep easy during the daylight.

Hi my name is Brett Bumeter, I’m a blogger, not a vampire, and I work late late at night.