My Friend is Married to the Shrew From Hell

A friend of mine has been living in a loveless marriage for years. But it's gotten even worse recently. His wife has long insisted that things be done her way with precise exactitude and that my friend jump to her every imperious command. But over the past couple of years, she's become the shrew from hell who not only stomps and yells like an insane person when she doesn't immediately get her way, but she even makes thinly veiled threats that if my friend doesn't do what she says, she'll kick him out of the house, and if he refuses to leave right then and there, she'll call the police and falsely accuse him of a serious crime, like the wife of someone I know may have done years ago when she accused him of molesting their young daughter, and he ended up going to prison and then being deported after he served his time.

I find it close to unfathomable that someone could treat her spouse or anyone else this way, no matter what the provocation. I find it even more so that my friend's wife could treat HIM that way. I've known my friend a long, long time, and he is the most mild-mannered and accommodating person I think I've ever known. He also doesn't lie and isn't prone to exaggeration, so I have no trace of belief that he's lying or exaggerating about his wife's behavior. If anything, he's probably understating just how bad it is!

I don't know how I would feel or what I would do if my wife treated me this way. I know that I'd get the hell away from her as soon as I could possibly manage it, because my vow to stay married "for better or worse" never extended THAT far. But I don't know how well I'd be able to hold my temper if she came at me with a hissy fit or with serious threats like my friend's wife does him. I'm not nearly as mild mannered or accommodating as he is. 

Thank God my wife is nothing like my friend's!

Reflections on Love and Marriage

I've continued to watch HBO's amazing dramatic series Tell Me You Love Me and to be struck by just how true-to-life it appears to be about intimate relationships. It seems to me that many couples, like those depicted in the series, are compelled more by their lustful attraction than by genuine love to rush into marriage, and before they know it, they're pregnant or have screaming kids running around, the thrill is gone, and little else remains to keep them together.

Each may finally see the other not through a hormonal haze but with enough objective clarity to realize that not only do they not really love each other, but they also don't really even like each other. Or perhaps one (or both) of the spouses changes so much over the years, for better or worse, that s/he no longer has the qualities that drew the other to her/him in the first place. And so some of these disenchanted couples simply get a divorce while others go to marriage counselors and try to patch things up and often end up divorcing anyway after all of the "therapeutic" revelations that dissolve what was left of any pretense of physical attraction or romantic love between them.

I'm grateful that I married as late in life as I did, without being heated to feverish folly by the flames of youthful passion that burned and scarred me in my more naive past, and that I didn't enter into my marriage with a rose-colored perception of my wife and with quixotic expectations that our marriage would ensconce us in a Utopian paradise that forever and completely fulfilled all of our personal needs and desires and deliver unflagging security and bliss while the world around us raged on. As silly as this sounds, I think many people do enter into marriage with these conscious or subconscious expectations and place so many demands on their spouses and their marriages that resistance to failure is futile.

I, on the other hand, believe that, rather than initially placing my wife on a pedestal from which she can't help but fall over time, the better I come to know her, the higher she rises in my esteem, the more I appreciate and love her, the more grateful I am to have her in my life, and the more I want to provide for her and please her in every way. It's not always easy, and I suspect that it's harder for her than it is for me, but I don't expect it to be easy, and, paradoxical though it may seem, that probably makes it a lot easier than it would be otherwise.

It may well be true, as has often been observed, that it takes hard work to keep a good marriage going, but it has to be some of the best kind of work there is.