Fight Night

So I made a mistake by telling the wife that I had a sex dream that didn't involve her. Especially after having sex with her in the morning. It's almost a cliche to suggest a pregnant woman is sensitive about certain things, but you throw in married, and the fact that girl told me in my dream that she was 17, I mean that shit pisses a woman off to no end. So she was supremely irritated with me, and like all married couples after the initial "I'm pissed off at you" moment, it moved towards the whole "finding faults with little things you do" style of domestic abuse. Complaints about my chorework (which is admittedly a problem), and that I spend too much time on the computer. Even after her walk she was still upset.

As I've grown older, I've learned some things that I didn't know as a youth. And one of them is that you don't bring up the subject that's annoying the person until they do (and often they want closure for themselves, so STFU if you can help it), and never put it on the level of "well, do you want out" until you need to press that button, but that button is an emergency setting and you better not be bluffing in those moments (also, bringing up "do you want out/is it over" can plant poisonous seeds). On that note the fact that I thought my wife wanted out when she was telling me she was pregnant has led to some profuse apologies, but I love giving them to her, because somehow that reminder strengthens our marriage. I mean, anyone who's had more than two relationships knows these things, but the sort of level of abuse grows when you're married (or so I've learned) because there is that sense of elasticity. That we are committed means that she can extract revenge at great length and with a level of malice heretofore unprecedented.

The problem with this sort of gameplaying is that often you can spot the mechanics of it, which you sort of have to, to know what sort of trouble you're in. But you should try to take it on like you don't know that it's something that must be flushed out the system. As a writer this level of the rules of the game is very amusing to me, but I know that I must play it, so I have to quiet the part of my brain that tells me the whole thing is show. Strangely enough this abuse and ritual reinforces that my wife really does love me - there's something to be said for the notion that you can only really get under the skin of the people you care about. I too sometimes feel the need to extract some punishment, but Aili tends to close the books faster then when the shoe's on the other foot. Also, it's hard to stay mad when your wife throws on some Broken Social Scene and puts on the lingerie after taking a bath. I'm not a fan of sexgames in general, but this sort of apology is a game to itself, and it creates a Pavlovian instinct in me. To that extent I think sometimes we fight to apologize. Again, the elasticity.

And then so after dinner, when things sort of settled down because I did all the prep work and cleaning, and also did some mopping today, and we got one of those clean stick things so I could dust away some corner cobwebs, anyway, that of course being my peace offering, and when it came up again at a more rational level, I realized how badly I fucked up.

I felt sort of faux-bad before, but here's the thing to which I cannot and try not to tell to my wife. I live in a sort of bubble. I can perceive certain things about interactions, etc. But often I am completely and totally oblivious. Some have told me that's a side effect of being a dude. But I never think of myself as super-covetable. And so for me, the idea of having a dream about a young girl desperate to fuck my brains out is amusing. It's not low self esteem, it's just I don't look like Brad Pitt or Orlando Bloom. I look like Phillip Seymour Hoffman. And some women find that very attractive. But it's not Kobe Steak, if you know what I mean (though I should refrain from food analogies after mocking them in a recent review). So when a hot girl is flirting me up I find it amusing, but I don't always (and sometimes rather wrongly) take it seriously. Cause I flirt with everyone, and this is LA. The problem is when you're married, hopefully you are Kobe Steak to your partner. And when your partner is in an emotionally fragile position, as their bodies are starting to change, and their desire to know that they have someone they can emotionally, physically et al. count on...They don't want to know you got a boner from some young girl even if she is a figment of your imagination.

There's a level of emotional fragility that I had never seen before in my wife. She's feminine, believe me, she's got all the requisite requirements, but even her more feminine moments tend to have an edge. Perhaps it's the whole accent thing, the language barrier. And I've seen my wife cry before, but the dinner conversation opened a whole new floodgate of worries and concerns I never attached to her. And the only reason why I type this out, to commit such a memory to the world is wanting to hold on to the moment I found out I could love my wife more than I did before. There was a sense and an air before that she didn't need me. And I liked that when we were mostly just fake married. And now I know my wife wants me around. Aili needs me around. And so I've gayed up the blog again, and even mentioned sex. I told Aili that I didn't know until tonight that she needed me so much, and she told me I'm an idiot. She's right.