Me vs. All The Joneses?!

Yesterday my wife learned from our agent that the sale of the house we were trying to buy closed with another party. (It's a long story involving a very messy short sale and some extremely questionable but evidently legally permissible behavior by the G-Sporting, house-adorned-with-all-the-de-rigueur-accoutrements-of-Mormonism sellers. That their teenage daughter had a baby last year and they filed bankruptcy earlier this year might have made me more sympathetic to their downturn of Lady Fortune's Wheel, had they not proven in the end to be such shysters, the slimy SOBs.) Last night she told me, in more or less these exact words, that she was "angry" at me a) for not earning more money, and b) for not having the courage to ask my boss for a raise. The ensuing discussion, as you might imagine (so I'll spare you the play-by-play), was delightful and thoroughly productive.

This morning, when she continued it as I was getting ready to head out the door, she cited as Exhibit M the fact that I, too, have felt and expressed to her occasional discouragement that I'm the most highly educated (by a wide margin), second-longest tenured, and lowest paid person at my level of the organization. I said, "That's right. But you looking at your profile in the mirror and saying, 'Dang, when is this baby belly finally going to disappear?' and me grabbing a hunk of your gut between my thumb and index finger and asking, 'How long you gonna tote this around, Jabba?' are two radically different approaches to the same topic, don't you think?" She looked at me, perturbed, and responded, "What on earth does that have to do with anything?!"

Oy.

So today from work, I tried a different tact with the following e-mail:

It's hard for me not to take personally (and/or wonder whether the "problem" is really mine) claims about my shortcomings as a provider, when in my mind, I'm thinking "Compared to the general population of this country --THIS country, not Nepal or Bangladesh or Ghana or Ecuador-- we have a very high standard of living, we have a lot of our 'wants,' our family's never gone cold or hungry (thanks of course to two months of Bishop's Storehouse Bounties 10 years ago [i.e., when, in the wake of the dot-com meltdown, the gap between my previous and current jobs dragged on a little long, and my business partner and I were busy naively getting screwed while doing some startup consulting for a con]) or without access to good medical care, and [my wife] has never been forced to work outside of the home in order for us to make ends meet -- a luxury, really, that is becoming increasingly rare."

If this is a hard concept for you to get your arms round, or you think that it's extreme or unreasonable, consider, for example, how hard it is for you not to take personally (and/or wonder whether the "problem" is really yours) my occasional expressions of frustration regarding lack of variety/interest/exploration of different possibilities, etc. in our physical relationship. Because in your mind, you're thinking, "Hold on -- By most standards, I'm an attractive woman, I'm not frigid, and this guy has never gone for very long without sex of some kind with me. Maybe he doesn't 'get' everything he wants, but he's getting enough."

Does that make sense? I'm not asking whether you agree with the comparison -- just whether it makes any sense at all, as a starting point. If it doesn't make any sense, I'm not sure how to approach this.

That was 14 hours ago. No response yet, and she was asleep when I got home tonight. (I'd been off magnifying with Ginger and friends.) We've been sleeping in separate rooms for a week or so -- started because I've been sick, but I think we're growing accustomed to it. Today, my boss told me how much, after 30 years of marriage, he loves now more than ever to get home to his wife and give her a big hug, that she is a living angel to him, and that he can't fathom being without her. I can't fathom how that must feel.