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DEAR MR. BLUE:
ADVICE FOR LOVERS AND WRITERS

Garrison Keillor

Bad behavior
My boyfriend says all women like to be knocked around a little and he's sometimes rough physically. It's so hard to keep struggling, but I'm terrified of being alone. What to do?

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By Garrison Keillor

April 18, 2000 |  Mr. Blue is in New York, the return address of many letters in the past complaining of loneliness and heartache, and when you walk a few miles down Broadway from the Upper West Side to Times Square, you do see some forlorn people, the well-dressed kind walking alone and looking on the verge of tears, and the tattered kind, sitting on a bench next to their grocery cart full of treasures. Mr. Blue is not tempted to stop people on the street in New York and offer advice, though. Even when sitting in a cafe and overhearing a New Yorker tell her companion about the latest jerk she dated, Mr. Blue does not lean over and offer counseling.

It is a great city if you're in the right frame of mind, and if you're not, there are places that can put you there, like Bryant Park, on Sixth Avenue between 41st and 42nd, behind the Public Library. It is simply one of the most splendid outdoor spaces anywhere. People with business in midtown come and sit beside beautiful plantings of tulips and irises, and look across a plane of lush grass, in a box canyon of handsome buildings, and turn their pallid faces up to the sun. The sunny side of the park has the crowd, the shade side is practically deserted. It's a diverse crowd, lots of suits both male and female, lots of blue collars, a smattering of tourists, young punks, old coots, two or three disheveled people slumped on benches and talking to themselves, and a few people like Mr. Blue who talk to themselves but for professional reasons. There is a cafe under canvas on a plaza for them what wants it, but it's so much more relaxing and sumptuous to sit in the square and soak up sun amid the grandeurs of New York. A block away is the old New Yorker office where the old heroes toiled and Broadway is just to the west and north and the old RCA studio where all those great original-cast albums were made is on 44th and of course that literary hothouse, the two great reading rooms of the library. After an hour in Bryant Park, Mr. Blue is sorely tempted to tell his letter-writers, "My dear, you really ought to get outside more." A person can sit at a kitchen table and accuse himself of all sorts of failures and betrayals and work himself into a dark mood indeed, and a person can also go outdoors and sit in the park and take the sun and lean his head back and feel somehow lucky. Sometimes life is almost that simple.

A number of readers chided me for my advice to Heartbroken, the wife whose husband is profligate with money (including a monthly $500 marijuana tab), and I'm sure the readers are right. I told her to split up their finances so that he couldn't drag her down. The readers pointed out the obvious: $500 is a lot of money to spend on reefer every month. (I guess it's a lot, I don't know, I'm not active in the market.) "It seemed rather obvious to me that their problem was not about money, but rather her husband's drug addiction," wrote one reader. "Anybody who smokes that much dope has a big problem." Well put.



Mr. Blue

Garrison Keillor's column appears every Tuesday in Salon Books.

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Feeling blue about your prose? In the doldrums over your last date? Ask Mr. Blue.



Read books by Garrison Keillor at BARNES & NOBLE

 

Another reader wrote: "As a former lover of a habitual pot-smoker, I can guess that money issues are not the cause of the friction; rather, the friction is the result of the pot habit. The money issues would cease to exist if the pot issue went away, and if Heartbroken stays in this relationship, she will continue to enable this person to medicate himself and be unavailable to her."

Another reader said: "I learned the hard way in a somewhat similar situation that one who uses marijuana on that scale is dependent on it, and it totally screws up how they relate to the world."

Dear Mr. Blue,

I'm 31, dating a guy of 32 for four months now. I am not really sure if it is serious or not. I often feel like just some skank he's out to bang. However, he has hinted that he'd like to spend more time with me or even move in together, and when I call him on the carpet for behavior I don't like, he listens and says that he'll try to do better. Sometimes there is improvement.

The behavior that disturbs me:

1) Saying "all women like to be knocked around a little." (He's since stopped saying this.)
2) Very rough physically, sometimes bruising me. (He has since been gentler as he's clued in that I don't like it.) This behavior has included kicking me in the behind when I'm putting on my shoes and "play-threatening" me with a belt.
3) Going through my pockets and wallets in front of me (because "It's fun!").
(4) Being very obvious about "girl-watching" when he's with me.
(5) Sometimes taking 24 hours or more to return my phone calls.

I have tried a couple of times to break things off with him, but I just can't seem to do it. Either I lose the nerve or he talks me out of it. I'm so afraid of being alone. I feel so incredibly lonely, all the time. A year ago, the one good guy who ever loved me decided he no longer wants me. I really don't think I'll ever again be treated as well as he treated me or be really loved again. So if that's the case I might as well stay where I am, it's as good as it gets. I feel so lost. The behavior I mentioned he has worked on so it's not as serious anymore -- but it's so hard to keep struggling. Oh, what to do, Mr. Blue? I want a new life.

Lonely

Dear Lonely,

I don't know what "very rough physically" means exactly, whether he's slugging you or kicking you or if it's a playful boot in the butt, but at worst it's grounds for a battering charge and at the very best it's boorish and idiotic, the behavior of an 8-year-old bully. It isn't something you beg a grown person to change; it shouldn't be there in the first place. I don't care if he's modified some things and stopped saying, "All women need to be knocked around." It's simply abysmal, period, and you are in such pain from the loss of your old love that you cannot bring yourself to stand up for yourself. But you must. It's your life. You can't let somebody kick you around and treat you this way. It isn't funny, it isn't anything, it's just sort of hopeless. The searching of your wallet -- deliberate humiliation. The ogling of other women. The coolness to your messages. Don't struggle with this. Don't accept it. Walk away from it. You can have a new life. The moment this idiot is out of the picture, life is going to look very new and a lot more fun.

. Next page | You have grasped onto the great kisser as a crowbar to pry you loose


 
Illustration by Zach Trenholm




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