Marriage

I am very eager to have babies with the man I love. With us now moving, kids are on the back burner because we won’t have health insurance until one of us lands a job with benefits. We had been trying to get pregnant until the decision to move was made because I have decent benefits with my current hateful job. (One of the reasons I haven’t quit, the other main one being that I’m trying to hold this job out till we can move.) I really want kids soon; I have wanted to be a mother since I was 5. But the stress of life and my failing body seem to want other things for me. I had injured my back at work and now am in physiotherapy to heal it, yet I’m still obligated to work my full shifts. Those eight-hour shifts literally drain me. I haven’t had a period in 3.5 months (my doctor insists it’s stress-related). And most recently, my pap test came back with abnormal cells on my cervix. No further tests have been done, but my doctor thinks my back, lack of period and abnormal cells are at least partly because of too much stress. Hard not to be stressed when all these symptoms have made me worry and fret even more about never being able to have children! The more that I worry, the more stressed my body becomes. The more symptoms of the stress I experience, the more I worry. (A huge catch-22.) One of my worst fears is to end up being barren.

On to my other issue. My fiancé and I both smoke marijuana regularly. I will note here that we do not smoke cigarettes at all, nor do we drink alcohol very often. Although I have heard that it can prevent couples from conceiving, I only “slowed it down” when we were trying to get pregnant. My fiancé seems to have his usage under control. He is able to use on a part-time basis and not every evening and every weekend. I am a different story altogether. I use (abuse) marijuana for stress. I rush to get home after work to have the bad memories of the day dissolve into higher thoughts. I am not high at work, but evenings and weekends are full of my usage. It’s the way I’ve taught myself to deal. Although I don’t think marijuana is an “evil drug” that “leads to other drug usage,” I know that I am misusing it. I have never felt the need to try any other drug (besides alcohol and caffeine). But I barely even notice the effects any more. Despite that, I can’t imagine quitting it altogether. I know that if I were pregnant I would not smoke at all, because there is another human being involved who would be affected by it.

But without marijuana, how would I deal with life’s stress? Plus there is some part of me that feels like marijuana is not bad. You ought to know that in my family, a few other people smoke marijuana. My aunt and cousin probably use it once daily, and my mom and brother once or twice a week, and my dad on occasion. While they never permitted any drug usage as a teenager, I found out and smoked with family after turning 19. Obviously this is a huge part of the reason why I can’t seem to convince myself that marijuana is “bad.”

This new city will not have any marijuana contacts for my fiancé and me, and it is my plan to stop smoking when we move. But really, I don’t want to stop at all, and I feel like I’m lying to myself by thinking that a new city will stop me from finding a way to do it. Plus, my fiancé is moving first, and we will be apart for a month (we’ve never been apart for longer than 10 days in the past four years). I know that with him gone, I will want to smoke even more. Especially because I feel like I want to get as much smoking in before I “can’t” anymore.

I know several people who use marijuana more than I do and who firmly believe that no one can get addicted to it. I guess I’m not so sure about this, but I would like to believe it because then I’m just a hippie and not an addict. I worry about the usage affecting the physiotherapy on my back, but since we aren’t trying to get pregnant, I still smoke whenever I want to. My fiancé knows that I smoke too much, he knows that I KNOW that I smoke too much too. But month after month he still brings it home for us. I have tried to quit before, asking him to keep it all hidden and out of sight. This always fails, because I will find it and sneak some or bug and bug him to get it out of hiding for me.

I don’t think I can stop until he stops bringing it into the house and we get rid of all the marijuana paraphernalia that is around our place. If my fiancé doesn’t want to quit with me, I would be disappointed. But as long as he kept everything out of our house and cars, I think I could do it. I really do want children in the long run and better physiotherapy results in the short term. What do I do?

Moving and Shaking

Dear Moving and Shaking,

You are using marijuana to relieve stress.

Stress is your problem. Whether you stop smoking marijuana or not, you need to learn more and better ways to relieve stress.

Start doing tai chi; start doing yoga; meditate; take naps; breathe deeply a lot; do biofeedback. If you are doing any of these activities already, don’t conclude that since you’re doing it a little it must not work. Instead, do it more.

You may need higher doses of yoga to get relief. Also, if you are consuming lots of caffeine, see about cutting back. Try substituting some herbal teas for caffeinated beverages now and then. Notice the difference. Especially in the afternoon, cut out the caffeine so you can get a better night’s sleep.

You will notice things about yourself this way. You will notice the different qualities of consciousness that arise from various techniques. It will be entertaining and interesting. You will notice a gradual improvement in your ability to go through life in a relaxed, worry-free way. Unpleasant activities like work and dealing with power-hungry blockheads will go more smoothly.

During this time, you might want to experiment with not smoking for a time. Pick an occasional time when you are stressed out, and instead of smoking, do 15 minutes of meditation, or some tai chi or yoga.

Don’t try to quit all at once, especially not on your own. Just learn some better relaxation techniques. Take it easy. Look for gradual improvement.

Once you’ve found other ways to relieve stress, you may not feel so fearful about the idea of quitting marijuana for good. Try going without for a few days at a time and see how that goes. You can always smoke. But experience what it’s like to handle life without it. Try to get accustomed to that feeling. You may feel slightly on edge, but take a deep breath of fresh air instead of a hit of weed.

The thing is, whether you call yourself an addict or not, changing habitual behavior is hard, and it’s especially hard to do alone. It’s hard to do without a program. It takes time, effort and support, and there are ups and downs. So I wouldn’t recommend trying to stop smoking marijuana on your own, or just with your fiancé.

As you say, for a variety of reasons, you are going to want to quit. So what I’m suggesting is that you prepare, in these ways, for the day when you will need to quit. I’m sure marijuana gives you other things besides stress relief; it probably gives you a heightened sense of the beauty of life, of tastes and sounds, and of general well-being. These things you may need to seek out in life; I find that there are other ways to feel these momentary highs. Seek them out.

For quitting things, as you probably know, I favor the 12-step method because it has added benefits: It helps you get your life together and is a lasting program of living. It is a community. It works for a lot of things.

When and how you quit is up to you. I can say that based on experience, it is definitely possible. You can quit and lead a normal, happy life, when you’re ready to. My bottom line is just that A) You should acquire new stress-relief methods first, before trying to quit, and B) what was B? Oh yeah, B) Don’t try to quit on your own. If and when you do decide to quit, do it with a group or a program behind you.

And, hey: Good luck. You sound like really nice people and I wish you the best in life. And say hello to the kids when they come. And say hello to the mountains.

Thanks!

Dear Cary,

Hmmm. I won’t write this like a writer, more like the utterly confused person I am. I’ll sum up. I’ve been with BF/husband (I didn’t want to get married, he did) 15 years. He came with three daughters, all filling pages of the DSM. One is bipolar, one BDP, one ADHD etc., etc. At the time I was 30 and had just lost both my parents very suddenly, I was making a lot of money, had inherited some and was really trying to pretend nothing had happened. We were great. I still think he’s the funniest human I’ve ever met and that we share that thing all good couples do: We think we’re better than everyone else. Fast forward. His insecurity has dogged us from the beginning. Had I been more aware and noticing, I would likely have run.

Three years ago we lost our dog. He was our child. The one thing we had together. It was bone cancer and it was awful. It probably triggered for me the memory of losing my parents so quickly — I went a little nuts. I had an affair, I left, I ended the affair. I was so fucking sad I couldn’t stand it. I drank a lot.

Meanwhile, I’m a writer. Literary, but not totally insignificant. I’ve been sober for about four months, and working desperately to finish this new book I have due.

A week ago I learned that he was setting me up, saying, “Your phone rang and it was a blocked number, is there anything you want to tell me?” All this involves cappuccino and serious face. When I realized he was making it all up, I lost my mind.

I can’t take it anymore. Every day is a prosecution. There’s more, of course. A lot. I tiptoe around him, he’s angry most of the time and his three grown daughters don’t want to talk to him without a therapist in the room. He’s brilliant and tricky and there is no way to win. I can’t fill the black hole anymore.

And why now, besides the obvious? I’m sober, I’m working, this book is good … why would he tear it out from under me? I know it’s not conscious, but it’s incredibly twisted.

I love him, and we were better than everyone else, but he’s killing me. Dead.

Tormented

Dear Tormented,

You’re four months sober. You’re going to have to take this on faith. Nothing else matters. Nothing is going to be the way it was. There is nothing to do but stay sober. This other stuff will get sorted out later.

Four months sober is its own special condition. It may manifest as confusion or certainty, clarity or dullness, energy or lethargy, high or low, but it is an edge; it is a liminal state out of which a strange future is being born.

You can afford to slow down now and not try to figure everything out or fix everything. It wouldn’t help anyway. Your old fixes won’t work. Well, they might seem to work for a while, but the point is that you need to abandon them because they will not lead you where you have to go now.

No matter whether you finish the book or don’t finish the book, stay married or get divorced, as long as this sobriety goes on day after day you are going to reclaim your life, your childhood, your spirit. You are going to see and feel things that were formerly only a dull buzz or murmur. These dull murmurs of being will provide the sinews of a new construct. It will not be the you that you envisioned when you were busy envisioning yourself. It will be different. But it will be authentic and thus suffused with the energy of life.

Imagine looking at what your husband is doing and not needing to do anything about it.

You will shed many illusions. You will shed the illusion of being better than the rest of us — beneath which has secretly lain the illusion that you are worse than us. These troubling illusions of separateness and hierarchy will go away and you will be reunited with humanity on an even footing.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life.

Your husband and others will attempt to get back the old you who would engage their craziness. Observe this from a safe distance. Don’t engage their craziness. Stay safe in your four months of sobriety. Finish the book. Take long walks.

Your husband has lost you. You are no longer entertaining him in his madness. So he is reaching out to you. He is trying to get you back.

Don’t go there. You will just have to stand firm.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life. Finish your book. Take long walks. It will start to make sense.

It is Christmas and I am visiting my family and he has stayed back at home. He is not with us. I really don’t know why … something about my family ignoring us when we visit and he has a lot of work to do -– which could all be true, depending on how you look at it. We are flying back Christmas Day so we can be with him, but frankly I think this is nuts. Why didn’t he come with us? He said if we wanted to be with him for Christmas we would have to stay. I told him, “If we move to Europe next year I won’t be with my family for Christmas for a long time, maybe years. I need to go.” He said, “Then go.” So I did. Now I think, what the hell happened? Is he being crazy selfish? Or do I need to get over a childish need for us all to be together?

He works insane hours (six to seven days a week) in a very stressful environment and we don’t get a lot of quality time with him. When he is home he is an incredible dad and I actually really love him even though sometimes I can’t talk to him. How can I leave all my family and friends when he can’t take three days for Christmas to be with us? How will I survive the loneliness when we leave? I know his family, I love his family. It is not the same. I know his friends, I love his friends. It is not the same. Do I take the leap? We have a daughter. If things don’t work out between us, I can’t just pick up and leave to come back. I will be stuck there in beautiful, economically crushed Europe.

You can’t tell me what to do … but what should I be thinking about? How do I know if we have fallen off the cliff?

Map Reader

Dear Map Reader,

My guess is that your husband needs solitude and doesn’t know how to ask for it. That’s not your fault. You can’t read his mind. But it’s something the two of you may want to work on together. Why did he beg off on Christmas? He needed the solitude and rest but didn’t know how to say it or did not know that was what he needed.

Maybe he thinks he’s not entitled to solitude because he’s got to be such a good dad all the time. What would happen if just for a few weeks he wasn’t such a good dad? Would everything fall apart?

Send him off to the woods to do some hunting and fishing, or put him in an ice shack on a frozen lake, or put him in a spa. See if that helps.

You’re not moving in the wrong direction. You’re just moving.  You come up against obstacles. You come up against someone else’s nature. This is conflict. Conflict is natural. Rather than avoid it, the trick is to learn how to benefit from it. You benefit from conflict by recognizing that it’s a sign of your differing strengths, and learning to make more room for those strengths, and call less upon each other’s weaknesses. Sounds easier than it is, I know. It’s much easier to write it than to do it. I’m just saying, it’s not that you’re going in the wrong direction. You’re just encountering normal conflict, normal differences.

As far as the map analogy: I’d say the map you have is missing the town called “Solitude” and the town called “Recuperation” and a town called “Just Goofing Off” and a town called “Just My Friends, Not Yours” and “Just My Family, Not Yours.” Those are places worth stopping off at. You get stuff there. Maybe there’s a big ham on the table in one of the houses and it reminds you of when you used to feel just fine as a kid.

So each of you needs to put some places on that map where you can pull off the road and visit. Otherwise you’re just driving and driving and driving. You never see what you’re passing. No kidding, the kid wants to stop too.

To speak abstractly about the difficulties that arise in relationships, it is worth repeating a syllogism: He is not better than he is nor are you better than you are.

Some syllogisms are so true that we drift into thinking they are false — that things can somehow be as they are and also other than they are at the same time. They can’t.

Things can be as they are or they can be different. They cannot be both at the same moment.

Thus we’re stuck with what is right now.

Right now we can do things so later it will be different. That’s mainly what we’re about most days. We’re doing things now so later there will be a paycheck.

I know this sounds impossibly childish. It’s me imitating Gertrude Stein badly sort of. It’s a lot of things. It’s me under deadline just typing. It’s me with corny jazz on the headphones that keeps me writing. It’s the language machine turning of its own accord. It’s a lot of things.

So back to you and your husband. Forms of art — narrative and poetry, in particular — can crystallize where you are and what you are feeling right now and you don’t have to go to a museum. For big paintings, yes, but not for narrative art, which comes in small books and on Kindles and iPads. I suggest you seek out poetry and narrative fiction that crystallizes many of your emotions; I suggest living more in the complex constellation of what is actually going on.

Because nothing really bad is happening. You are just living with an actual person who is trying to get stuff by not talking about it.

During my campus years I matured to become quite social, especially as an activist, since I knew that at least campus was a more stable environment than I ever had at home. After graduation, my family coming from a very traditional Asian background with rather strict moral and religious values, arranged a marriage with the girl who would be my wife, and after months of bitter disagreements (I prefer not to use the word argue) I finally gave in.

From the start, I realized I would start in a loveless relationship and that I would have to learn to love her eventually, and I did learn to love her. Things started to take a slow but dark turn as my wife then started to control my life, especially when it came to women (she had serious abandonment issues) and rather than risk breaking up my marriage, with the obvious socio-cultural fallout it would definitely create, I chose to suck it up and simply let it slide. Eventually it progressed to the point that she became paranoid about every single person (male and female) that I knew, convinced I was having an affair with them. This got worse over the course of her pregnancy, and this to me was literally a living hell. For the sake of my child, I stood by like an idiot going along, but in the end after she gave birth, SHE said she couldn’t take it anymore and packed up and left with my son when I was overseas. I tried going after her and my son, but now she’s staying with her family and they refuse me access to my son. Any contact I have with them is simply via their lawyer. For weeks I couldn’t sleep or concentrate. I even managed to mess up an important project that got me fired from my job.

I just don’t seem to have the energy or focus to pursue anything now, and have distanced myself from everything. I started to drink rather heavily as well as smoke (I used to campaign against smoking companies). I realize that this could be classified as clinical depression but I just don’t see any solution.

My few remaining friends keep telling to get back out there, but every time I do it feels awkward, especially after having such a controlling person so central to my life for the past two years. I can’t seem to fight the urge to blame others for it all, especially my family, but in the end I know it was my fault. I can’t help but imagine what I’m putting my young son through, imagining what kind of life he’d have growing up without a father, since I had mine all along the way. In the end even though I feel an intense anger to them, I still feel I’ve let them down. I’m just clueless about what to do and that frustrates me even more since I’m usually a very driven and focused person.

As incoherent as it is, please help.

Clueless and HOMEless

Dear Clueless and HOMEless,

I have felt the same way you do. The exact things that have happened to you have not happened to me, not exactly, but I have felt the confusion and sense of betrayal, of having tried to do the right thing and have it come out badly, and the sense of not having a home.

So I speak to you with tears in my eyes. That is probably not the most disciplined way to write a column, and it may seem as though I am being melodramatic or currying sympathy but it is simply the truth, and I say not so much to arouse emotions in others but because, actually, I would like to bring tears into the written discourse of elite American society, so that over time it might become acceptable for a male writer to say from time to time that as he writes there are tears in his eyes — just as a statement of fact, not as a device. There are many traditional strictures under which a male writer writes, and for a long time I have followed most of them. I came across a line from Strunk and White the other day to the effect of, “Keep yourself out of it,” and I thought, my, how far I’ve drifted from the true and orthodox practice of “good journalistic writing”! (It’s complicated, trying to introduce things into language, as they quickly become their opposites. Yet it interests me, the notion of trying to normalize certain phenomena; it seems like on rare occasions it might be one small way to change how we talk with each other in writing. In more grandiose and hopeful moments one might think it could change how we men habitually process emotion and thus decrease the incidence of depression. But that’s pretty far-fetched. All I’m really saying is that I’ve been very emotional lately and your letter stirred me up again.)

It was the second anniversary of my father’s death last week, and I was not able to fully grieve his death at the time, so that is surely part of it. But your loss is your loss, and it’s real. There is loss and pain and these things are real and that is what crying is for. I hope you are crying from time to time because it makes you feel better afterwards. It lets you know what you are feeling. In fact, it seems that certain things can only be felt by crying; we may think we are feeling something but until our body begins its desperate heaving and sobbing we are more just observing it, knowing it is there, but not immersed in it. With the crying, one feels the emotion in one’s whole body; it passes through us, leaving us more alive. There is no doubt or confusion in the moment when one breaks down and cries; there is only the feeling, and the body suffused with that feeling, hot and awake to sadness and anger.

So when this feeling comes over you, do not be afraid to cry. You may cry for your boyhood, too, that lonely time of wandering, left to yourself, trying to become a good man against difficult odds, working to become a modern man in a family that practices ancient customs. It must have been hard for you growing up like that, especially since you seem to have a modern mind, the mind of an activist, the mind of a man who knows that society can change and people can change. So there must be a split between what you know intellectually and the demands of your family. To marry this girl in fact, therefore, must have required you to renounce a large part of yourself, the inquiring, socially aware, critical side. Yet you did it. You did it out of love and respect for your family. So you sacrificed a part of yourself and then this sacrifice was devalued, or annulled, by your wife’s decision to leave and take the baby.

Having no outlet or solution, you have turned this anger and frustration against yourself. That is likely one source of your depression; the way out will be to undo that act, by accepting that you are not the cause of this, but simply an actor with good intentions and a good heart, caught in a powerful system beyond your control. A good therapist can help you do that.

So do not blame yourself. You have done what you could. You have tried to do the right thing. Now your job is to take care of yourself, to get help for your clinical depression.

When we are depressed, we don’t think logically. Our thinking is clouded. So do not trust your thoughts on this. Trust medical science. Trust other people who are not depressed. They can see things a little more clearly than you can right now.

Now it is time to get help for your depression. You may find yourself putting it off or thinking of reasons not to do it. If so, I suggest taking certain simple, direct steps. Think of it this way: You have a new job. Your new job is to treat your depression. Call a hotline, find a psychiatrist or psychologist who can help you.

Take heart. There are a lot of us out here, and we do understand each other.