Thoughts in the midst of a thunderstorm

Am sitting at home in the midst of a wonderful thunderstorm. My son was supposed to have soccer camp, but it has been raining fairly hard since early this morning and storms that are located to the northwest are predicted to continue to push through in a southeasterly direction. So we are going to be soaked today (four inches of rain so far...). I have made an executive decision and canceled his participation in soccer camp today. We will hang out and maybe even accomplish something

The thunderstorm is making it difficult to connect to the internet, which is putting a serious crimp into my morning email, blog browsing and other internet diversions.

In addition to the things that are going on in the lab and my gardening and home improvement projects (which are taking a hit today because of the rain), I have been thinking about my relationship with my wife. The general question is when and how does a person decide that they no longer wish to be in a particular relationship with another person. The specific question is how do I recognize that I have reached this point in my relationship with her. The difficulty here is that I have never been 100% happy and I have never been 100% unhappy. There are aspects where my satisfaction is 0% and there are aspects where my satisfaction is above 50%. The relationship works, but it does so because I make compromises. And probably too many compromises. I realize that I am not the only one who makes compromises, but my sense is that I give up more than I get.

So I tell myself that I have decided to place a time limit on this relationship. A cornerstone of my ten year plan. I have done this before - ten years ago, in fact. During a hiking vacation in Colorado, I came to the conclusion that I would give this relationship two more years - till Y2K. This was driven by the knowledge that I was deeply unhappy with the state of our sexual relationship. During those two years, I told myself, I would be the best father that I could be. And then I would move on. Well - eight years beyond that deadline, here I am - proposing another deadline. In the meantime, I have grown and matured in some aspects. But a deep dissatisfaction in this relationship persists. Or rather, a deep dissatisfaction with my life. How can I tell the difference?

It has always been difficult for me to understand that relationships grow and change. I have a vivid memory of being a young boy, standing by the sink drying dishes while my mom was washing them. I had been thinking about the whole process of growing up and becoming an independent person and living on my own and made the comment that I would probably just run away when I was old enough. My mom was quite shocked though she dealt with it very well and calmly said “I hope you don’t, we’ll always be here for you”. In some ways, my comment has proven to be prophetic, as staying in touch with my family has never been one of my strong points. Hence, a strong argument in favor of my ten year plan, as opposed to moving on with my own independent life now, is staying connected with my son and helping him through the transition to independence.

I find myself drawn to blogs that talk about the changing nature of relationships - marriage, divorce, moving on with life. I am particularly interested now in how the nature of these relationships change over time. What I need to do is survey the literature, arrive at some ideas and begin testing them in my own life.

Conversations

The past three months have been quite busy, what with hosting a conference at my university, teaching and the usual end of semester stuff, a grant review panel and then writing a grant of my own. So here it is, July Fourth almost, and I am looking forward to some mental down time.

The grant that I just submitted was interesting, for several reasons. One was that it required me to talk to a lot of people that I did not know - either by email or by phone. Now talking has never been one of my strengths - particularly when it involves people that I do not know. When I was a kid, for example, I hated to talk on the phone and would avoid it at all costs. I absolutely hated those fundraiser type of activities, in which the kid (me) was supposed to sell candy bars (or whatever) to neighbours, friends and relatives. This should have been an easy thing for me to excell at - as there was certainly an abundance of relatives in the immediate vicinity of where we lived that I could call on. But I was terrified of calling them up. I would get incredibly tongue-tied and not be able to get past the word "hello". And calling up girls just to talk to them or, heaven forbid, ask them out for a date? Not on your life!

I've overcome this, to a large extent. One trick that I've learned is to jot down the things that I want to talk about, so that I don't forget them should the conversation take a different turn than I expected. And during my formative years as a faculty member, I put myself in charge of ordering (usually by telephone) the supplies and reagents for my lab. Nothing like a little forced practice. And I can be pretty persuasive over the phone - in all the conversations that I had to initiate for the grant that I was writing, I had no difficulty persuading the listener to go along with my proposal.

But still, I find that keeping track of the conversations was mentally exhausting - whether the conversations were by email or by phone. I still find that I have to prepare for the conversations - that I have to think about exactly what to say, how to say it, and how the other person is likely to respond. I don't know why the ability to hold a conversation does not come naturally to me, so I write it down to yet another Aspergian trait.

So, that is one reason for my extended absence from posting. Spending a lot of mental energy in email and phone conversations to achieve an external goal, I did not have much left to devote to converting my inner thoughts into electrons. But am looking forward to enjoying the rest of the summer - and maybe even getting some work done in the lab!