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Can men and women truly be friends?
- - - - - - - - - - - - Dear Mr. Blue, A couple of months ago I got dumped by an old male pal of mine.
Silently. He just vanished, no fights, no discussions. He is a courtly,
warmhearted, principled guy who I've known for 10 years, a confidant.
My therapist thinks I was a romantic fantasy for him and he had to let go.
That, even in platonic relationships, men are more motivated by sexuality
than women are. Frankly, this didn't occur to me. Now I'm looking at my
other guy pals, wondering if this person will betray me too? Is it possible
that when you get right down to it, men and women truly can't be friends?
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. Hurting Dear Hurting, Unless the men are gay there is usually some sexual undertone to friendship with women. Normally it remains subterranean, the man himself unaware of it, so it's no problem, but any buried feelings can come to the fore, and perhaps your old pal got confused by his feelings. Or maybe he is just depressed, or is going through a crisis that leads him to want seclusion. Your therapist's interpretation is the $21 one, and sometimes the truth is down in the $3 to $10 range. Don't worry about your guy friends, based on your therapist's theorizing. Friendships between women go through ups and downs too. Men and women can be true friends, and then sometimes some of them can't. Dear Mr. Blue, I am on my second marriage. I was widowed at age 25 with three children. I have been married for less than a year and my husband is gone all the time. He works a job all day and plays in a band most weekends. I am 28 and he is 38. I have been feeling less and less like a family as the months roll by. I take the kids to their activities and take full responsibility of all household chores. Was it wrong of me to think that when he asked me to marry him he would take the role of being a father? And if so, how long do I give him to adjust? Single Married Dear Single, Surely your husband did not take up with this band suddenly one weekend a few months ago. Surely you knew about this when you married him. What you didn't know was how much you'd dislike his absence on weekends, but surely you were aware of the parameters of his life. If, by "adjust," you mean "give up playing music" it probably won't happen for a while, and if it does, it'll be for his own reasons, not yours. As for stepfatherhood, it's a gradual process, and one must be patient and wait for affections to develop and bonds to be struck. Sit tight, take things week by week, make the most of the time you have together and do the best job you can raising your children. Dear Mr. Blue, What should I do? I have been married nearly 30 years, since my late teens. My wife is a good person, a good mother, a hard worker, who gives me plenty of space. But romance not only is long gone, it seems unrecallable. Our bedrooms are at opposite ends of the house (so my snoring won't bother her). She doesn't visit me, since she's bothered by the mess of my room, and I've stopped visiting her, not enjoying being gently kicked out after a short stay. We both love our family, but don't really enjoy each other's company, and do most everything separately. She seems content to keep things as they are. But I feel torn and sometimes impossibly lonely. I can't imagine how to extricate myself, and yet I find it almost unbearable staying. I'm at a loss. Your thoughts? Sunset Blue Dear Sunset Blue, You're stuck in a rut of anger and self-pity. So do something. Don't sink into the mud. Make your room as inviting and cozy as you can and invite her to visit you there. Arrange to go on a trip with her. Get outside the home and outside your marital history and your misunderstandings, and sleep in a room together. A long ocean voyage perhaps. A hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail. See what happens when you get away. There are a hundred other small steps you could take, some of them tiny indeed (work on your appearance, change your routine, try to make mealtimes a little special, make a big deal about anniversaries and birthdays), but sometimes a jiggle can loosen the logjam. Dear Mr. Blue, I am 41 and on my second marriage, to a man I love to pieces. When things are good, they are very good indeed. And when they go bad, they are very, very bad. If I say something in a fit of pique, or frustration, or anger, or hurt, he is wounded and silent for hours. I believe in kissing and making up, so as to minimize the upset, and he stays mad for at least the rest of the day and often the next day or even longer. He says he "needs time to heal" after getting his feelings hurt. I feel I am being punished. Apologies don't work with him. Talking it out doesn't work. I'm afraid if I don't try to reconnect, we'll just drift apart. Should I accept this painful behavior as the price of an otherwise happy marriage? Is the silent treatment normal male behavior? Stymied Dear Stymied, The behavior is immature and rather common, especially among men who perhaps are less socially adept on the whole, less able to tolerate differences and deal with disagreement, more apt to be thrown into a funk by an angry word from the goddess of love. I don't say you accept this behavior, but you do accept that it will modify only slowly over time, and that you need to tone down your fits of pique. Make them less piquant. If A leads to B, then you may need to change A at least a little. But when he goes into a swoon, you needn't be silent and moody yourself. You can be perfectly cheerful and ignore his silence. He's playing it up for you. Don't be such a good audience.
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