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Dance of destruction
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March 21, 2000 | Mr. Blue loved being there with Mrs. Blue and Baby Blue,
strolling through the sunny piazzas with splashing fountains, appreciating
the various ruins, enduring the aggressive sidewalk vendors and spending
literally hundreds of thousands of lire like it was Monopoly money. The
baby toddled around the Pantheon on ancient pavements, and ancient Italian
women smiled their crooked smiles and murmured, "Bella bambina," and the
baby's father paid a visit to the church in the Piazza del Popolo where
Martin Luther came as a young friar and observed the excesses of the
popes and hustled back to Germany to start the Reformation. Mr. Blue has
been in more churches in the past week than in the past 10 years. He
walked into one vast baroque space after another, Bernini angels fluttering
on the ceiling, lighted candles for various friends and family, and went back to
the neighborhood to shop for dinner, at the grocery, the meat market, the
bakery and the green market. The Italian men who ran the green market
looked at Mr. Blue and decided that he was French and, after the shopping
and the weighing and the wrapping and the paying, they said, "Bon soir, monsieur." To be taken for French is, for a guy from St.
Paul, all by itself worth the airfare. Dear Mr. Blue,
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. I married a funny and charming man four years ago when I had a horrible
secretarial job and a tendency to complain about life, and since then, I've
been through a bit of therapy and pulled myself out of the rut and went
back to grad school. Now I feel I have a bright future. The problem is that
as my personal successes mount, my marriage seems to
crumble. My husband says he supports all of my goals and is proud of
me, but when I go out to study, he complains that I'm abandoning him. If
I talk about work successes, he complains about how much he hates his
job. To make matters worse, he's become addicted to marijuana. When
he's high, he's tedious. When he is sober, he is irritable, complains
constantly and sometimes becomes verbally abusive. He's very resentful of
the fact that I make more money at my part-time job than he does at his
full-time job. We've been fighting more and more lately. If I met my husband today, I'd never consider marrying him. In addition to the
complaints and the screaming, he's started throwing things and shoving
me. After recent fights, I've stayed with friends and things seem better for
about a week. I'm not ready to give up yet. We recently started
counseling, but I'm not sure how sincere he is about it.
I'm thinking of getting my own place for the next six months. My
husband thinks that a month apart to cool off would be enough. My
friends think forever would be a wiser choice.
I can't decide what to do next. I can't motivate myself to act. I don't
even have the energy to get out of bed in the
morning. What do I need to do to get back in control of my personal life? Frozen Dear Frozen, The two of you are locked into a dance of destruction, and
you need to break out. You need to get out of range of your husband's
anger, finish up grad school and get your career under way. His anger
probably has something to do with his imagining that you and he would
be partners in the pits of despond and you surprised him by climbing out,
so he's terrified of losing you. Go. Keep in touch with him, if you can,
and continue the counseling if you have hopes of saving the marriage, but
the first priority is to pack the bag and call the cab. The motivation is
safety -- shoving can lead to battering -- and also you need the clarity
that a serious separation will bring.
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