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I am 35 and have been with my wife (dating, living together, then married) since college. We've had our struggles, but we have two beautiful children and everything seemed fine until the past year when I got laid off and went through a business failure and suffered various financial problems. It's been depressing. My wife, however, is doing very well. I have suddenly become worried about our marriage, based on her increasing communication with an old friend and mentor, one of her college professors, with whom she had a very intense relationship. She tells me it was never sexual, though they exchanged poetry and long letters and have stayed in touch over the years, and when he's in town, she tells me when she is going to meet him for drinks and dinner. I have no interest in denying her this friendship. He is very sensitive and spiritual and I admit he probably gives her things I cannot. Recently, I saw an e-mail from him to her where he says, "I miss you too," and comments on how stressful and hectic life is. This immediately set me off and brought back a flood of bad memories from a time before we were living together when my wife cheated on me. I found out about it from reading her diary and we had a huge fight and didn't see each other for about a month. Then we got back together. She said that this experience allowed her to realize her true love for me. But over 10 years later, this incident continues to hurt me. I should be over it and I'm not.
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. This is the issue: I love my wife but am not sure how to give her what she needs. I think I treat her very well and that we have a fairly intense relationship. I am a very involved father, helpful around the house, etc. Yet I need to figure out how to make my wife have those romantic feelings with me that she has with her old mentor. In Need Dear In Need, Your wife is not having an affair with her old professor, so don't imagine she is. She is merely reliving her youth and letting the old windbag flatter her and bestow his gaseous profundities on her over wine and shrimp linguini. "Very sensitive and spiritual," my foot. You have a generous imagination: You've built him up to be the Dalai Lama and he's just Bill Moyers with hair in his ears. Never mind him. Don't get all frothed up over his e-mails. Don't get in earnest discussions with your wife over this. To be paranoid about this old codger is the very opposite of romance and makes you look terrible. I don't know what happened 10 years ago, but it was before you and she were living together and so it's irrelevant; the statute of limitations is in effect. You may not be over it, but don't talk to her about it -- it's very very old news. Focus instead on your daily life and your family. Try to make some sweet and beautiful moments. If this sounds trivial, I don't care, it's the truth. The terrible thing people do in a crisis is to clench up inside and stop living. You already have a romance with your wife; you're living it every day; the children are evidence of it. Live your life here and now. Plant some flowers, talk with your children, tell jokes, put Bach in the CD player, fix big salads and make yogurt dressing, read poetry, take long walks -- do all the simple graceful things people do to mightily improve a day. These things have power over ghosts. They can't solve your financial problems but they can help dispel your fears and open up your mind to the beautiful possibilities of the future. Enjoy the summer. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm 28. After teaching high school for five years, I went back to graduate school this year. It's a good program and it's what I really want, but I find myself incapable of enjoying it due to my lack of confidence. I have always been shy, but it has never been so much a problem as now. I can barely bring myself to talk to my professors, I put off doing necessary things because I feel unable to deal with people, etc. I can rarely even bring myself read the comments on my papers. Speaking in class terrifies me. I take the small mistakes I make too seriously and beat myself up about them endlessly. Although I've written one final paper this semester, doing the others seems impossible. Writing has become excessively difficult. I am almost incapacitated by guilt and pressure to do the things I have been avoiding. Strangely, all my grades so far have been excellent. I really do like school and especially the writing. I want to succeed, but I seem to be preparing the opposite result. I wonder if my lack of confidence stems from the overdue end of a three-year relationship almost a year ago. I should have stopped it much sooner. I can't believe I subjected myself to so much bad treatment and misery and now I question my intelligence and judgment in general. I've never had these problems before. How can I get my voice back, Mr. Blue? Too Shy Dear Too, Sorry you're suffering such a rough patch right now. Your loss of confidence probably has less to do with the bad romance than with the five-year hiatus from college. That's a long time to be away from the circus, kid. Writing papers at a graduate level is serious work, and it takes time to get back in the groove mentally. But your skills are still intact, and your basic smarts and your drive to succeed, as shown by the fact that your grades are excellent. Your letter is a pretty good example of beating up on yourself. (Some people do this all their lives and call it "perfectionism".) One small suggestion. Whether you're religious or not, try observing the sabbath, the day of rest. Choose any day, but stick to it for a year and be strict: no schoolwork whatsoever. Don't even think about it. No guilt on the sabbath either, because you are obeying a higher edict than grad school. It's a day of rest in every way, the day that we owe to our creator and to ourselves, to lift our hearts from the grind and behold the beauty of the world and fulfill our souls. Beat up on yourself for six days, but on the seventh thou shalt not beat. It's a small thing and difficult, and if you can manage it, it can help your situation. Dear Mr. Blue, I am involved with a wonderful man, the love of my life. The problem is, he's asked me to marry him, and though I love him, I am fraught with angst in that he has two small children (aged 6 and 9) from a previous marriage. I am 40 and have one son who is 18 and off to college this fall. For years, I had envisioned myself being child-free at this point in my life and able to concentrate on the things I put aside for all these years. Am I being selfish? In Distress Dear In Distress, If he is indeed the love of your life, then you are to some extent bound up with small children, not as a mother but as a sort of aunt-with-portfolio. Contemplate aunthood. You can be an Aunt or you can be an Ant: An Aunt is more forbidding and foreboding, with her hair up in a bun and a pince-nez and a starched jumper, and the Ant is the fun one who plays "Chopsticks" with you and teaches you hearts and solitaire and tells you mildly ribald jokes. Your choice. Your original vision has been upgraded. Be selfish and go ahead and concentrate on those things you put aside, and simply allow for the fact that two little kids may occasionally interrupt you. You're smart, you can handle it. You don't casually chuck an L.O.L. over the side.
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