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True love or just chemical imbalance? | page 1, 2
I have been married for 11 years to a man I have adored since the day
we met. A year and a half ago, I discovered his affair with a co-worker.
He refused to end it, then tried, then failed -- and so on and so on --
throwing me into a period of the most intense and sustained pain
imaginable. I am mostly OK now -- still in love with him but clear that
our relationship cannot work right now because he cannot give up the
other woman and he does not feel passion for me. A month ago, after I
told him I was planning to file for divorce, he proposed that we try again
to see if we could reconcile. I agreed, with trepidation but ever hopeful. But
he never got around to breaking up with her, which devastated me. I
have resolved to serve him with divorce papers as soon as my lawyer can
draft them up, and I am hoping that the finality of the divorce will help
me move on. The problem is that there's still a little voice inside my head
telling me that he'll want me back one day, and that little hope feels
comforting. Am I just sabotaging my own recovery by clinging to this
hope? Put another way: Can I will myself to stop loving him? Sad but Hopeful
Dear Sad, You will hear all sorts of voices and wishful thoughts and
wonder how you could make things different, but you are not in charge of
this situation now: he is, having decided to take up with someone else.
And you must separate yourself from him so that you can take charge of
your own story and not be the victim in his. This means forging ahead
with the divorce. Don't waste time trying to figure out your husband.
Invest some time in thinking about what you would like to do in the next
six months. Cook up plans to do things and see people who make you
happy. That's your first step out of this misery, the pursuit of personal
pleasure. Dear Mr. Blue, I dated a woman in high school 40 years ago, and since then we've
stayed in touch and kept track of each others' marriages and divorces and
now, grandkids. She has moved back to our hometown, not far from
where I live, and a couple summers ago I asked her why she broke up
with me after I joined the Army. "Because you never wrote," she said.
So I wrote her some letters. I have wanted to rekindle our old friendship
at least, and if she showed interest I would write more letters; I suppose I
have written 20,000 words to her by now, and it is becoming
heartbreaking. She has a much tougher heart than I. I am hopelessly at
sea in this matter and hoping you can help. Far from shore Dear Far, This is a sweet story, a man courting an old love, and I wish
you well. But of course you know the heart has its own wisdom, and hers
may no longer be open to you. There's no advice to give. Yours is a noble
pursuit, and I am rooting for you, that's all. Dear Mr. Blue, I've been married to a wonderful man for 18 months. We have a
home in the city and 40 acres in the mountains. Recently his ex-girlfriend has moved close to our mountain retreat. She used to spend a lot
of time at the place. I asked my husband what he would say if the
ex-girlfriend wanted to spend time at our property, and to my horror, he
said that she would be welcome, that he considered her part of his family
and that his loyalty to her was as deep as his loyalty to me. I am
crushed. I do not want to share our real estate with his ex. What do you
make of this? Devastated Dear Devastated, Don't try to measure loyalty. Don't get in a territorial
fight. If he wants to be friends with his ex, then he's going to, and you'd
do better to put on a hospitable face and learn to be pleasant around her.
There are ways to fight this fight, but be wise, don't do it head on. And
don't turn your back and sit in the city and be devastated and let Mountain
Girl walk yodeling through the forest. Invite her to dinner and kill her
with kindness, is my advice. Become her new best friend. Dear Mr. Blue, I am 29, married less than a year and just had my second
child. Since the baby I have felt sooooo unattractive. My
wonderful husband tells me every day how pretty I am, but I feel like I
look disgusting. Since the baby, my husband and
I have only been intimate four times. It's not that I am not attracted to my
husband, it's just that I feel so
unattractive myself. What is wrong
with me? Wanting-to-feel-Pretty Mr. Blue Garrison Keillor's column appears every Tuesday in Salon Books.
Feeling blue about your prose? In the doldrums over your last date? Ask Mr. Blue. Dear Wanting, Four times in the first four months after childbirth strikes me as above average, maybe even an all-time record in your county. Giving birth is a large event -- that's why we pay homage on Mother's Day -- and the first year of a baby's life is a real marathon, and depression seems to be part of it. An anxious, sleep-deprived lady who has just extruded an 8-pound person cannot be expected to play the seductress. I mean, you sound lovely but you're not immortal. Exercise is a good all-purpose tonic for feeling unattractive. Pop the baby in the stroller every day and go for long, brisk walks. See if your wonderful husband can't spring you loose so you can go to a health club, jump around and sit in a steam room. And you undoubtedly could use more sleep. And you're doing fine. Dear Mr Blue, I am a 29-year-old writer who has not really written for three years, since the start of my present romance, except for a salvo of letters home when I was overseas alone for a month. I have been diagnosed as having depression, but I don't think that's the cause. It's a motivation thing. I'm not lazy, but I have an abnormally high moment of inertia. I'm sure I could write if I had a timetable, say a weekly column, with an editor bashing me to get it done. I'm tired of not writing. I miss writing. Even writing this letter was a small catharsis. So how do I get up the energy to look for such a job, and how does one tell a prospective employer that one is unmotivated? Inert in Saskatoon Dear Inert, Confessing to lack of motivation is an awkward moment in any job interview. It tends to broaden the employer's role in the direction of therapy, and your chance of finding an employer eager to solve your motivation problem is slight, I would think, though perhaps things are different in Saskatoon. You'd have to be a brilliant writer for an editor to be willing to bash you every week. Are you? Maybe your high moment of inertia is a sensible reluctance to write under insufficient pressure, not having enough you really want to say. It's like my inertia when it comes to badminton. I just don't get the thrills from it that other people do. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm a writer who lounges around the cafe with a notebook looking disaffected and writing nothing but odd scraps of stories and essays. I had pretty much accepted the fact that I suck, when all of a sudden my fragments of stuff appeared in a heap before me and cried out with one voice, "Publish us! All texts are incomplete! We represent neither narrative nor argument but the raw matter of experience itself, and hence are more honest and uncompromising than a regular-type author's wicked attempts to impose a hegemonic form on his interaction with the reader! Our very half-assedness is our integrity!" So I was going to dump all my papers in a box and send them to a publisher, encouraging him to make of them what he will. Do you think I have any chance at all of getting away with this? Postmodern in Petaluma Dear Postmodern, Ever since "The Bridges of Madison County" and the rise of the postmodern memoir -- the book about writing a book about thinking about writing a memoir -- I don't pretend to know a thing about what is publishable or what the American people will take to its collective bosom. I think the journal of a disaffected coffee drinker in the Poultry Capital of California could be a terrific read, especially if it's as witty as your letter. Do not, however, send this box to me and do not send it to David Talbot, editor of Salon, in his luxurious walnut-paneled office on Mission Street in San Francisco. He'll have enough to do trying to piece together my next column, which I will send him in the form of random sentences and clusters of words and entries torn from the dictionary. Dear Mr. Blue, I've written for my own spiritual and artistic fulfillment, never intending to be published, and then got this one idea that is too big to be put down in short form and that I'm sure other people could benefit from reading, so I've been letting it stew and develop in my head before I start taking up time writing it down. Now I feel apprehension about starting to write it. I'm afraid that once I start writing it down it will just seem like some dumb story. How can I convince myself that my writing is good enough to do my thoughts justice, never having had anything published before? Inexperienced but Inspired Dear Planet, This apprehension is part of the joy of creation. If we could simply squeeze our heads and produce a stream of prose out our left nostrils, it wouldn't be half so much fun. Don't worry about not being good enough. Go write what you need to write. Dear Mr. Blue, I am a 28-year-old grad student in love with an extremely attractive woman who says she loves me but hates the city we live in so has taken a job in another city and is moving in August. I plan to go with her. She won't consider a long-distance relationship. I can transfer to another school (not as prestigious as this) and get my degree. I would be miserable if I stayed here and let her go. Though it frightens me that she means more to me than this particular school's degree. Am I nuts? Is she selfish for not considering staying? Is it OK to give up some goals for the potential of Love? No Right Answer Dear No Right, Go and Godspeed and vive l'amour. So you're giving up
Harvard for Western South Dakota Tech. If you're in love, follow her. Is
she selfish? I don't know. But she's honest about what she wants, and
that's good. You can find ways to demonstrate your talent and smarts even
if your degree is from a mediocre school. Don't be frightened. That's
your parents' job, not yours. Feeling blue about your prose? In the doldrums over your last date? Ask Mr. Blue.
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