Anger

Anger is a funny thing, it appears when you least want it, but hides when you need it. I want to feel angry. I want to rage at the injustice of living an honest, open life and being taken advantage of. I want to be able to yell and ask how my wife could do this, where was her conscience, her sense of decency? How could she violate my trust so completely when I gave it unconditionally? How could she so completely abrogate everything our marriage and relationship was supposed to be? How? HOW???

And yet I am not angry. I am baffled, puzzled, hurt, even resentful, but I find it hard to be angry. I'm working on it ;-). I think it is because I know my wife too well: I understand too well how it could happen, how the emotional abuse of her childhood may have caused her to shut down the part of her soul feeling loyalty and obligation to people close to her. Those people hurt her. I understand how her strict religious upbringing taught her guilt and self-loathing for the great sin of being a sexual being; how her father poured contempt and derision on her for being a woman and how he abused her vulnerability and relative weakness. I understand how she might have wanted to feel good about being a woman, a strong, tough woman in control of her own sexuality. I comprehend how she may have learned to shut down the part of her which sought out romance and intimacy, having been denied it in her marriage to me. I can see how she might have been desperate to feel the love and approval she wasn't getting from me, to feel the connection and tenderness I was unable to give her for my own reasons. I can see how she would have loved to feel beautiful, wanted, adored, how the ability to attract men would have been irresistible. I see the allure of feeling appreciated, being wanted and accepted. I understand her wish to wholeheartedly reject the shame associated with sex.

I can see how the seeming inevitability of her actions and the shame at having violated her own sense of morals might have been overwhelming and caused her to decide she no longer cared about right and wrong; how after a while she might have stopped even asking herself what is right and wrong.

And here we are, at a crossroad, deciding if we can recover from this tragedy and sally forth together or if the pain of deceit, resentment and past hurt is more than we can bear.

I understand all this I and I am sad. How I long for the simplicity of anger, that pure, beautiful, uncomplicated emotion.