Sucking Up and Kissing Ass

Interregnum comments (I'm not feeling completely on top of describing Monday night yet).

So we had another discussion in the garage while mrs_c smokes yesterday.

I come home. I tell a funny story (yes, it really was funny) and mrs_c doesn't even attempt to laugh - she then gives me this faked smile she gives when she's trying to tell me that she's being nice, but is actually mad at me. I want to go exercise, and I know it will blow up before I leave, so I figure if I just drag it out of her immediately maybe I'll get to exercise on a timely basis (interesting how the problems always seem to occur on my exercise nights...).

So I just ask. And ask. And ask. And ask again.

Finally she says to come out the garage while she smokes and she'll tell me what it's about. I dutifully follow and she tells me. She's been thinking about this time she phoned me at work last month and told me about something she was mad at me about. I don't remember exactly what it was just at the moment - it was something about how I've failed her throughout our entire marriage and if I really loved her I would show her that I did. I said to her "Well, I'm at work right now, and I'm meeting a deadline, so, I hear you and agree that we'll discuss this later, but I don't have any magic words right now to make this better." She says "well this is another indication of how much you really care." I respond with "As I said, I have no magic words to make it immediately better, or are you just looking for a way to get me to spend all my time kissing your ass?"

(I didn't used to fight like this - only the last few months since I decided I didn't really have to take it any more)

She hung up on me and I went back to my work. She called back a little later to tell me that my response shows how much i care. I tell her that it seems OK for her to call me at work and yell at me, but that she seems to not think it's OK for me to get a little testy and let out an intemperate remark. I say that we will discuss it all later, and that I'm sorry i became angry, but i really couldn't have this discussion from work. I then said i would take the rest of the day off from work if she wanted to discuss it - but she'd have to as well. She backed off and said it wasn't neccessary, we'd talk later.

Back to yesterday.

She tells me that she has been thinking about things and that her problem is that she is resentful of all the time I've let her down. She says to me that the reason she "bottom feeds" during our fights is because she can't elicit an emotional response from me. She says I go poker faced and reply in monotones and don't show that I am emotionally engaged with the discussion. My response was that I go there because emotional reponses during such situations have always had a negative outcome, so why the hell wouldn't I hunker down with a stone face?

So she starts going on about "If that's the way I want our marriage to be, is devoid of emotion, then [she'll] just have to learn to remove all the emotion from her life if that's the way I want it" and so on

Well it went this way back and forth for a bit with me justifying why it's OK to remain rational and calm, and her telling me I'm an emotional stone.

She went back to the issues around my business and the deal I cut with my clients and the tax people and said that this was the beginning of the problem, and that she thinks I have some making up to do and some apologising to do for that whole set of circumstances that she thinks I haven't done yet (I've been apologising for years).

Apparently I'm supposed to show her I'm sorry about this set of events in 1997 by doing nice things for her now. A set of events she has said was in the past behind us.

I also find it convenient because it's the one thing that I have done that could be called questionable (beyond regular day-to-day dumabassed shit). For those who haven't read that post - I cut a deal with clients and the tax people to get myself and my business out of some problems caused by my partner failing to complete some of his work read here for details. I didn't tell mrs_c about the situation until after the deals were cut. It left our household income at the level I had committed to, but left me(us) with a set of obligations which had to be paid down after the fact.

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Yeah. So I look at my words here on this blog - not just this post, but all of them - and realise that her attacks and style have remained the same all through our marriage, just the subject she pummels me with changes.